


Buried in the Snow

by Paper0wl



Series: Rod and Shield [17]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Supernatural, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, Past Brainwashing, The Winter Soldier - Freeform, secrets and lies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-03
Updated: 2015-09-17
Packaged: 2018-04-12 19:29:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 36,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4491894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paper0wl/pseuds/Paper0wl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Try as she might, field operations involving Lux/Morrow tend to be case studies in the practical applications of Murphy's Law. For example, her attempt to depower the Horseman War somehow leads to a revival of World War II.</p>
<p>Plus, it turns out she's been working for the bad guys. So much for her second chance.</p>
<p>Still, they should know better than provoking the devil's daughter. Fuck HYDRA!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Um. Funny story. The original plan was "Morningstar is not involved in CATWS at all," but, well, War didn't agree. So I wrote this instead. It only took a year to finish it.

Dawn was shimmying through an unfamiliar air duct when it occurred to her that perhaps she spent too much time around Clint. Because she was nearly positive that before she met the former-circus-performer-turned-spy-slash-superhero she wouldn't have had the inclination to go creeping around an unknown, possibly hostile stronghold, even if she  _had_ found War on the property.

 For all that she was officially a licensed field agent (twice-over), she didn't do“real” undercover work. Dawn’s version of “undercover” was an overly complicated conspiracy involving her identity. The last time she had tried infiltration-by-air-duct Clint ended up with hearing aids. Given Murphy's apparent fascination with her field work, that probably wasn't something she should be remembering when she in the middle of elbow-shuffling her way through the ventilation system of a re-purposed bank in the middle of the nation’s capital.

 Famine had gone down in a hunter slap-stick fiasco. Pestilence had almost taken one of her ninjas down with him. Given War’s propensity for mind-games and the _unfortunateness_ that could follow head scrambled ninjas in a major metropolitan area, she opted to be the only one on-site for the third Horseman’s take-down.

 It had been surprisingly easy, especially compared to the other two. He had been too busy gloating about humans being clever vicious animals and that all he had to do was sit back and watch them all kill each other.

 He hadn't been gloating when she took his hand off with her sword. Without his ring, War was less than nothing. Unfortunately, War being reduced to a nonentity didn't do a damn thing about the troublesome pull emanating from the third ring in her collection.  _Something_  in this building had drawn War's attention strongly enough that it didn't fade immediately when he lost power.

 Which really could mean nothing good.

 (Murphy’s obsession with her field work was just delayed a bit. Figured.)

 And while dealing with powerful, murderous supernatural shit was something she'd done all her life, taking the initiative to investigate a  _potential_  problem before it became an  _actual_ problem was purely the result of fifteen years with SHIELD. She had been a very strong advocate of the "run away from the problem" philosophy up until one particularly innovative but not overly bright demon had decided that overloading a nuclear reactor would be a great way to kill the Morningstar's daughter. That it would have caused untold amounts of human death and suffering was just an added bonus as far as the demon was concerned. She had just been lucky that her SHIELD-appointed assassin had gotten a chance to watch the resulting showdown before putting an arrow through her eye.

 Of course, if Clint had killed her in Barseback, she wouldn't have accidentally released Lilith, she wouldn't be juggling two lives, and she wouldn't be crawling around in a ventilation system on the recommendation of  _War_. Granted, if Clint  _had_  killed her in Barseback, Lilith would have gotten out six years sooner and faced a whole lot fewer obstacles on her path to Apocalypse, so, there was a bit of trade-off there. Maybe if she had never gone to Barseback at all? Mmm, she'd probably still be imitating an ostrich, if she was even still alive, so that one was a no-go too.

 Given the options, maybe the air ducts weren't so bad, after all.

 Granted, the air ducts were in a building chock full of well-armed mercenary types that reminded her of the ones Phil’s fake-psychic had hunting her down. Of course, they also kind of reminded her of the more thug-ish of the SHIELD agents, because, really, there were only so many ways pseudo-military groups on American soil could act. Idly, Dawn tried to decide if Murphy was better served by these guys being the _same_ set of mercenaries after her or a different group. There were pros and cons to both, so it was hard to say which would be worse in the long run.

 And in the end it didn’t matter either way because Murphy’s latest party trick was the same thing War had been interested in. Looking down through the vent at someone who _should not be here_ , Dawn decided then and there to never again complain about the epic saga of Clint and the Duct-work.

 Desperately hoping she wasn't going to regret this, Dawn drew on just enough of her birthright to soundproof the room below her without attracting any untoward attention, either from Righteous Dicks with Wings who wanted to smite an abomination or Goons with Guns who happened to notice an unusually high content of static electricity. That done, she drew off into the ducts and dropped down into the corridor around the corner.

 Taking a quick moment to fix her appearance, she took a steadying breath and rounded the corner with the air of someone on a mission. Nodding to the two men guarding the door, Dawn was halfway past them when she suddenly whirled around to lash out.

 Both guards went down with remarkably little fight and hardly a sound. Identifying one of her resulting feelings as disappointed, Dawn shook her head – she spent too much time around Natasha as well. She stashed the unconscious bodies in the first empty room she found, taking a quick moment to stage the two in a compromising manner. She bit back a grimace upon realizing that she clearly she spent too much time with Tony and tried to tell herself it was only so their first alarm would be disregarded.

 She spent too much time around Gabriel to quite believe that.

 Shrugging those somewhat distracting thoughts aside, Dawn smoothed the wrinkles from the fight from her clothes and circled back to the door her latest victims had been guarding.

 The only person in the room wore an ominously blank face and no shirt. Considering what looked to be a perpetual scowl, a large collection of scars, and a surgically attached armament, Dawn suspected this was more living weapon than man. He looked up at her entrance.

 Dawn wasn't the type to pray – a quirk no doubt due to her long history of getting attacked by angels. Discovering God had taken a sabbatical, and being on close enough terms to routinely call the most irreverent archangel an asshole probably didn't help much that either. Which wasn't a problem, but it meant that when she took the slightly insane path to bluff a deadly assassin and hope it worked, she was pretty much on her own.

 That wasn't as common a state of being as it used to be, solo mission against War notwithstanding.

 "I have –" a task? an assignment? a mission? "– a mission for you." Task was too blah, and assignment made it sound optional. Agents had assignments. Weapons had missions. She hoped.

 He didn’t spring up and attack her, or show an inclination to do so, so Dawn took that as a sign she hadn’t screwed this up yet and continued. "This is a highly covert mission. No one can know before its completion; no one can see you. Avoid detection. Bodies and disappearances leave a trail – don’t leave a trail."

  _I hadn't expected you to be such a cold-hearted bitch._

 Yeah, well, that’s what happened when she was in charge of an officially non-existent organization featuring innocent lives and world-changing secrets. She turned into Nick Fury.

 Not that Nick Fury would turn a man into a weapon, take away his choices, and erase his life.

 But she knew enough beings (read: angels and demons, some pagans) that saw nothing wrong with that sort of thing to be able to fake a calm façade. Dawn Morrow had too much empathy to work for anyone who turned humans into mindless weapons. But, unlike Kyria Lux, Dawn was willing to fake it.

 She rattled off the address to her nearest safe house that SHIELD didn't officially know. Unofficially was another matter, but as long as there was no paper trail it was fine. "I will meet you there in five hours with the details of what you must do." Five hours was possible without being simple, but it left her enough time to figure out what the fuck she'd walked (elbow-shuffled) into.

 The assassin stared at her silently for a few minutes and she refused to allow herself to feel fear. She did not want to have to kill him, but she doubted she would be able to drag him out of here unconscious. Better all-around if he left freely under his own power, as dubious as that distinction was. When the blank staring showed no signs of abating, she considered the potentially ill-advised notion of attempting to use War's ring. Kyria had no desire to become a new incarnation of War, but with two other rings and the power of the Morningstar behind her, that probably wasn't a worry. More likely, she'd end up calling down an angel.

 She already had to deal with regular mercenaries. There was no reason to throw the angels back in when she had successfully lost them shortly after the convergence fiasco.

 The assassin abruptly nodded, rendering the point moot, anyway. Grabbing a shirt, vest, and gun, he stalked out into the hallway and disappeared.

 Kyria looked out the way he left and shrugged. That worked.

 After a brief argument with herself over the importance of information versus the risks of being tracked, she drew a small flash drive with what looked like a tiny bulb of (literally) sparkling water attached and plugged it into the back of the farthest computer terminal. A few hours for the virus to spread through the system and the Tech Twins could remote-hack. She wasn't completely sure she could draw the drive back to her safely, but destroying it would work fine in this instance. Wishing there was a better way to do this, Kyria vanished back into the air ducts.

 ***

 It was only after she was safely gone and sipping an over-priced cup of iced tea that she went over her information with a fine-toothed comb. It was times like this she wished NINJAT had a more firmly defined command structure. She was the Ninja Director, regardless of whether she was Kyria or Dawn, but since NINJAT was an unofficial subdivision of SHIELD, the hierarchy got weird after that. All the different supernatural groups tended to have their own leadership, although they mostly were all willing to work with the hunters, whose own leadership was distracted with modernizing the Men of Letters. The only person the various sects all agreed on as overall leadership was _her._ But even Fury had Assistant Directors! Granted, she was unofficially one of them, but still.

 SHIELD had central leadership. The supernatural ninjas mainly operated as loosely affiliated cells. Not even the info-share of the ninja boards changed the fact that the only “central leadership” the ninjas had was her.

 Few ninjas understood the intricacies of SHIELD and global intelligence, and the handful of ninjas _in_ SHIELD didn’t have the clearance for this sort of shit. Fuck, most of them didn’t even know she had anything to do with Phil surviving New York.  Bela did, but she didn’t really want to rely on Bela’s opinion. Really, she wanted to ask Phil for help, but even disregarding one, his unease around Dawn Morrow, and two, the fact that he was busy, what was she even supposed to say?

 “Hey, Phil, I know you think I’m a cold bitch, but I think I just recruited an assassin an evil NINJAT entity was shadowing. The thugs working with him slash keeping him prisoner are probably going to be hunting us both, and there’s still a good chance he’ll try to kill me. Would it help if I mentioned he used to be Cap’s best friend?”

 She covered her snort with a mouthful of tea and cast a surreptitious glance around the café. Now she was going to have  _two_ sets of human bad guys after her. Peachy. One looking for the secrets supposedly possessed by Dawn Morrow, and the other seeking to reclaim what was obviously a brainwashed American hero. Plus, for all she knew, maybe it was the same group of bad guys. Granted that hero was from World War II, but Bucky Barnes was not the first person she met in the wrong time.

 He  _was_ , however, a mystery she needed to solve before the unknown bad guys, however many of them there were, caught up with her. At least the Horsemen were taken care of; the three insubstantial rings on the base of her sword were one less thing hanging over her head.

 She blew out a breath. One problem at a time.

 Dawn pretended to draw her modified StarkPhone from her pocket. It had taken half a dozen fried phones before she succeeded in tucking one away like her swords, but it gave Stark an excuse to get her where he could scan her. She didn't actually mind his minor fixation on unlocking her mysteries, and mostly protested because he then bribed her “cooperation” with an endless parade of phones and other electronic equipment.

 Maybe it was the influence of War's ring, or the presence of her metal-armed assassin friend, or the weight of two unknown and completely human enemies, or perhaps she just spent too much time around Nick Fury, but an unquenchable spat of paranoia had her using every trick and backdoor she knew or invented on the spot to traipse through SHIELD's database. Although she was faster on a proper keyboard than using touch screen keys, she forwent either for the faster, more efficient, less traceable, much less comfortable route of syncing herself with the device.

 With what was technically interdimensional energy, colloquially alien lightning, and essentially electricity pulsing beneath her skin, Dawn was a veritable computer whiz. Unfortunately, the disorienting sensation of trying to see something intangible, mixed with the uncomfortable knowledge that embracing too much of her Morningstar heritage made her visible to angels, plus the untested hazards of pitting herself against a computer virus, meant that only rarely did she manipulate computers directly.

 The direct link-up was significantly faster and couldn't be traced back to her, both important concerns at this time. Dawn wasted no time cruising through SHIELD’s files for an assassin with a metal arm.

 He was called Winter Soldier. She wasn’t surprised to learn there were unsubstantiated reports going back over fifty years – he was from Cap’s era, after all. Nat had a run-in with him. Huh. But Nat was on a mission with Cap, so she couldn’t ask her about it. (Yet.)

 Just as well, she supposed. Nat would be less than sanguine to know that an assassin who shot her in order to kill the scientist she was protecting was en route to getting folded into NINJAT. If he didn't try to kill Dawn in the process.

 What could she say? Dawn played loose and fast and by her own rules. Though, really, she was less worried about him killing her and more about her killing him to stop him from killing someone else. Enhanced or not, the Winter Soldier wasn’t quite in the same league as Malekith, Abaddon, or Elphaba. Of course he was mostly human and, twice an agent of SHIELD or not, she didn’t usually fight humans.

 Brushing off the network ghosts that tried and failed to get a handle on her, she sought out the films on Rogers, cut and pasted and saved the result to her phone. Between one breath and the next Dawn disengaged from the system. Then she caught sight of the time and frowned. That took longer than it was supposed to. She finished her drink and strode casually out of the coffee shop.

 ***

 


	2. Chapter 2

There was a car in the garage when she arrived at the safe house. Dawn wasn’t really surprised he’d stolen a car. A guy in a car was less conspicuous that a guy walking through the streets of D.C. looking like death with a rather big gun in broad daylight.

 No, what surprised her was the car itself. She knew more than a few people who would love to get their hands on a cherry red 1965 Mustang Fastback, but when she wheeled her motorcycle in next to it, she stayed as far from the car as she could.

 “And another, a red horse, went out; and to him who sat on it, it was granted to take peace from the earth,” she said warily eyeing the District of Columbia license plate reading NOTLUV.

 At least she didn’t have to worry about the driver or theft reports. That the Winter Soldier had stolen War’s car was just another foreboding sign the Horseman _liked_ the poor brainwashed Howling Commando, as if the pleased hum of the gold ring wasn’t enough.

 The man himself was seated at her kitchen table, the three guns previously stashed in the room laid out on the table beside his. Resolutely ignoring the creeping feeling that she had opened a bigger can of worms than she had expected, Dawn shared the video with the large and fancy television and hit play.

 It wasn't a particularly engrossing video, just a relatively short thing focusing entirely on Captain Steve Rogers. Even when he wasn't trying, Steve was  _memorable._  He also happened to be the best friend of the man she was trying to resurrect.

 Dawn didn’t know what she expected from the man so obviously experimented upon, but his expression stayed mostly blank for the duration of the recording, with only minute lines forming around his eyes to indicate what on almost anyone else would have been a frown. He remained silent for a time after the screen returned to blackness.

 “He is the mission?”

 His voice was rough and rusty from disuse, but she caught the faint note of hesitation in his voice and mentally smiled.  _Something_ had been started. “In a way. You are to remember him,” she corrected sternly, calling forth her inner ice-bitch.  _I am the evil minion of [insert evil villain here] and I have no heart for the memory-addled hero._  

 Steve wasn't the hero of this story. This was all about Barnes.

_That_  got a well-formed frown.

 “Your path previously crossed with that man, Steven Grant Rogers, called Captain America. Your handlers at that time kept inadequate records. It is imperative that we know what happened.”  _Please let this work._  Her fingers danced across the phone and the television displayed a carefully chosen photograph of the Howling Commandos, with a costumed but cowl-less Steve Rogers turned slightly toward James “Bucky” Barnes beside him. She had mostly edited Barnes out of the film, so as to not overwhelm the Winter Soldier.

 “I don’t . . . remember,” he said slowly, staring intently at the image.

 “We have time for you to work on it,” she reassured him. “Your maintenance has not been conducive to memory retention,” she said with a scientific detachment she did not remotely feel. Things like this were probably part of the reason Phil didn't like Agent Morrow. “But you are the only one who can tell me what I need to know.”  _Whether Bucky Barnes still exists beneath all that conditioning._  But that was a tricky layered question.

 So. Find a crack in the armor. Exploit it. Hope like hell SHIELD didn’t find out she was sheltering the Winter Soldier before she got an answer. Fury gave her a lot of leeway in her work, but somehow she didn't think harboring a known, unstable enemy would be something he was okay with. Unless he could plausibly deny it or cover it up. Well, Dawn Morrow was officially on leave right now, but she didn’t think that was going to help her with this.

 Especially since, as loyal as she was to SHIELD, and as competent as she knew them to be, she couldn't ignore the fact one (or both) of her pursuers might find her first. She  _hated_  playing hide-and-seek without a visible opponent. (See the irritation that was the Lilith Hunt for further details. Urgh.)

 Irregardless of her internal trouble-shooting, the Winter Soldier gave her a small, sharp nod. In response, Dawn pulled out the laptop she kept in the bookcase and made sure he knew enough to work it. He knew more than Steve originally did, but didn't learn as fast. She attributed both to his "handlers." But he picked up enough to handle the basics of searching the internet for reliable sources. Research was a critical part of any operation, even more so when trying to unearth buried, overwritten, hopefully not completely erased memories.

 In a deliberate attempt to appear casual, yet professional, possibly but not conclusively an evil, heartless minion, Dawn seated herself on the couch in the living room with her enhanced StarkPhone, a StarkTab she could connect for a larger screen, and a sideways view of her guest. From the tablet, she monitored his computer doings while writing up her report on War.

 It wasn't a report, per se, although the director did get a memo on the successful neutralization of "the Three Amigos." SHIELD didn't handle the real NINJAT files. Instead, her reports went up on the ninja boards, a combination chatroom/database that hunters, ninjas, and their affiliates could use to keep in touch, check current and solved problems, and keep track of any patterns or connections that became clearer with compilation and hindsight. Hunters' life expectancies were up, the civilian casualty rate were down, supernatural beings kept coming out of the woodwork and agreeing to the NINJAT terms, and, in general, hunters were more sociable and less "fuck off and die" than they had been in a very long  time.

NINJAT was a  _good_  system.

 She was proud to have created it, even if Fury hadn't given her much choice initially, and she’d had to inherit it from herself.

 As relieving as it was to post the announcement that the Horsemen were down for the count, many thanks to everyone involved in hunting them down, War kept her bothering her.

 Trying to decide if War’s interest had been in Winter Soldier or Bucky Barnes or the people behind the change from the latter to the former or the people currently using him as a weapon if the two groups weren’t the same only seemed to give her yet another headache, so she ordered pizza.

 As much as she wanted to ask her guest if he had a preference for toppings, it was much too soon in her opinion. He simply hadn't had time to break through nearly seventy tears of programming. So instead, she crossed Steve’s eating habits with Clint’s and ordered him a (semi-traditional) pepperoni pie and got herself one with peppers and onions, fully expecting to end up sharing.

 He hardly reacted to the doorbell or the delivery boy but looked up in blank surprise when she plopped two slices down in front of him.

  _I am a cold-hearted bitch_ , she reminded herself sternly, reining in her urge to kill the people who turned a human being into this. She didn't know who to kill. Yet.  "Eat," she ordered. "You will do me no good faint from hunger. There's more on the counter, water in the fridge, and the bathroom is the second door on the left. You may use it all as necessary."

 She did smile when he ate his way through a pizza and a half, flickers of confused enjoyment starting to show through tiny cracks in his stony exterior.

 Breaking down conditioning took time she knew, but she was using his conditioning against him. The Winter Soldier was meticulous and methodical, and she had set him at uncovering his own past. This was either going to work out well or blow up in her face. Dawn was really hoping for the former.

 She didn't think she'd be able to face Steve if she had to kill his long-lost best friend.

 ***

 The Winter Soldier didn't sleep. She'd offered him a bedroom and he'd just stated at her with incomprehension before returning to his research. Let it not be said that Dawn could not take a hint. But while he was awake,  _she_  wouldn't sleep. Partly because she was not comfortable offering up obvious vulnerabilities around him and partly because she didn't want to leave him on his own.

 Phil and some of the more dedicated agents had no qualms about going forty eight hours without sleep on just adrenaline and coffee. Dawn could do the same by plugging into a power source. Not literally, of course, but she drew power from the electrical outlets and forwent sleeping. It actually worked better than caffeine and adrenaline most times. She kept her energy usage at a low, consistent level to avoid any potentially suspicious spikes.

 Ninja safe houses were kept stocked with non-perishables, so she made oatmeal for breakfast, throwing in walnuts and raisins to offset the somewhat chalky taste. She didn't know who restocked this place last, but they had  _terrible_  taste in oatmeal.

 Her guest ate it with nary a response.

 Lunch was soup from a can, dinner was pasta with canned sauce. Through it all, the Winter Soldier didn't say a word, although his frown grew more pronounced. Dawn didn't say much either, giving him the illusion of privacy. She didn't know if he even understood the concept, but it made  _her_  feel better.

 The expectant silence that reigned in the house was broken only by the sounds of typing and was tense enough that she considered asking Darcy for a suitable playlist. She didn’t want to overload her guest, however.

 Dawn Morrow was a bitch because she was complicit in shady-as-all-shit methods to keep a good man from dying, not because she was complicit in shady-as-all-shit methods to turn a good man into a mindless killing machine. Seeing the latter at work sent her to the edge of a deep, dangerous fury she could not blame entirely on her heritage. By whatever adaptive moral code she had ever adhered to, she truly believed the people who did this were monsters and deserved to die. But without a target for her ire, she vented some of her fury by messaging the Tech Twins that they were about to be called in for what would probably be serious overtime.

 Neither complained. Hacking the records of a super shady organization in order to make amends was something they did frequently. Something on this magnitude, though, was a challenge they didn't get often. All they needed was her signal and they would be good to go.

 To distract herself from plotting murder, she googled “winter soldier” on a whim. There were a few of the expected conspiracy hits, but most of the results were about . . . Vietnam? Huh.

 Thousands of years old she might be, but that didn’t mean she knew everything about history. There had been something called the Winter Soldier Investigation about alleged war crimes committed by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. Whoever had Barnes – probably the Russians because they were the only ones sort of in the area with maybe the capability for that level of cybernetics when he fell off that train; the freaky science-weapon thing would’ve been right up HYDRA’s but they were scrambling to cover their asses with Steve’s bomb-carrying plane by that time– must have been laughing their asses off at the name.

 Or not. Ooh. That was interesting.

 “Winter Soldier” was a play on something from the American Revolution. No way had whoever named the brainwashed Barnes known that bit of American literature. It conveyed the wrong message for a scary mind-wiped assassin. Dawn rather liked it. _Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered._

 ***

 After another round of bad oatmeal for breakfast on day two of Operation What The F*** Am I Doing and no violent outbursts from her guest, Dawn judged it safe to leave him unsupervised long enough for a quick shower. Tying off wet hair in a braid, she told/suggested/ordered Barnes to shower as well.

 In hindsight, she didn’t know if that was a good or bad idea.

 He did the blank staring again. When he finally _did_ shower, he came back dressed in the same clothes, with blue lips.

 “The effectiveness of a shower is severely curtailed by redressing in dirty clothing,” she remarked dryly. He stared in confusion. Dawn sighed. “I left you clothes outside the door. Which might have been a mistake on my part. Sorry about that. Easily fixed though. C’mon. Let’s try this again.”

 The blankly confused staring evolved to implying she had three heads when she ran the water and asked if it was too hot. Apparently it wasn’t, because the second shower was significantly longer than the first. Of course, after the water shut off, there was a crash that had her on her feet and running.

 The only casualty was the bathroom mirror, having attacked the knuckles of his right hand before dying. He was half-dressed, staring fixatedly at the palms of both hands, before looking up at her abrupt stop in the doorway. His eyes were wide and bloodshot, showing more life than they had in the entire time she’d known him.

 "Who . . . are you? You're  . . . not . . . one of . . . them."

 Ah, breakthrough. And the only blood spilled had been his own, not even as much as she’d feared. Admittedly, that was much better than she expected.

 "No," she agreed, having only a vague sense of who "them" referred to, "I'm not. I go by a lot of names but you can call me Dawn." She considered saying more, but this first step was one he had to take by himself and the complexity of naming her would just confuse him for now.

 "Who . . . am I?" he asked hoarsely, his eyes darting to the distorted reflections in the broken, red-smeared glass, before focusing back on her as a possible lifeline. "That man . . . with my face . . . he died."

 "So it was thought," she replied gently. "But he may only have been lost. I can help you try to find what remains."

 "Why?" The word tore itself from his throat.

 "Because I know from experience that it's easier to rebuild yourself from the ashes when there's someone there to help."

 He shook his head. “They . . . I . . . what I . . . did . . . “

 “Wasn’t you. It’s _part_ _of_ you now, but it wasn’t _you_.”

 He kept shaking his head, hands curling up at his side.

 “They turned a man into a weapon and called it Winter Soldier,” she said bluntly. He flinched inward, shoulders curling in until he noticed, stopped, and refused to look at his left arm. “You can’t erase the Winter Soldier any more than they could erase you. You are more than the sum of your parts. You are James Barnes and Bucky Barnes and Sgt. Barnes and Winter Soldier and none of those pieces will ever go away.” _Even if you configure paperwork to say otherwise_.

 “You don’t remember much about American history, do you?” she asked, abruptly changing tact.

 “Ah . . . no?”

 She gave him a gentle smile. “I imagine the Russians decided to live up to the stereotype that their country is one giant frozen plane, but what they called you? The Winter Soldier? It sounds dangerous, but it’s surprisingly hopeful, from an American history viewpoint.” He looked slightly less tortured, but no less confused. “Thomas Paine. _The Crisis_.” Still nothing.

 Dawn took a breath. “These are the times that try men’s souls. The _summer soldier_ and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, _shrink from the service of their country_ ; but he that stands by it now, _deserves the love and thanks_ of man and woman. Tyranny, like, hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph,” she recited. Yes, she memorized the important parts. Or what she considered important at any rate. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the _depth of winter_ , when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to _meet and to repulse it_.”

 Wide eyes stared at her.

 “In the depth of _winter_ ,” she repeated, “when nothing but _hope and virtue could survive_.” She met his eyes. “You survived. Don’t let anyone take that away.”

 He nodded shakily.

 ***

 He looked less frightening and more homeless in sweatpants and a hoodie, especially with the lost and somewhat desperate look in his eyes. Granted, the glistening metal hand sticking out of the left sleeve clashed with the image. Not even Stark made prosthetics that mobile, although she supposed they could truthfully call it a prototype. Still. It drew attention. She made a mental note to find him a pair of gloves to better blend in. Maybe her leather bike gloves? His hands were bigger, but something in that vein, perhaps.

 She had a foothold in the mental landscape of the Winter Soldier now, but she needed more information on how they made him before she could really try to undo the damage. They also couldn't stay here when she didn't know who was looking for them. Holding down the fort in the suburbs while Ash and Charlie rummaged around for answers was a great way to put a lot of hapless civilians in harm's way. Having the Tech Twins searching while Dawn was on the move and couldn't pull the trace at a moment's notice was asking for trouble as well.

 That left going to fortified, if frustrating, ground.

 Steadfastly ignoring the Mustang in the garage, she put Barnes on the back of her motorcycle and, shattering even speed limit on the way, made it to New York in two hours.

 ***

 


	3. Chapter 3

There was a secret entrance to Stark Tower.

 Well, obviously. And, technically, there was more than one. (Plus the landing pad on the roof for flyers and modified Chitauri air-sleds.)

 Because while Tony could be an absolute ass, he didn't actually  _like_  being mobbed by paparazzi all the time. And because Pepper  _really_  didn't like it. (Just because Tony fixed Extremis didn't mean Pepper couldn't explode with the right provocation. Obnoxious reporters with flashing cameras half an inch from her nose could make even the most level-headed woman lose her shit.)

 So, yes, secret entrance, for both cars and pedestrians. As a media target after the aliens tried and failed to invade, Orion had used it more than a few times. Never with an unstable assassin, but then, she wasn’t really Orion right now. And the formerly brainwashed assassin hadn't tried to kill her the entire time he was clinging to the back of her motorcycle, so that was something. And whether it was the closed quarters, or the unfamiliarity, or the lack of obvious escape routes, or even just something in his head, Barnes was  _not_  comfortable. He kept glancing along the walls and at shadows, fingers on both hands twitching.

 There was a reason she insisted that all guns and knives be left behind at the safe house.

 "Wh – where . . . where is this?"

 "Welcome back to New York, Barnes," she said with a gentle smile.

 The look he gave her was an unsightly cross between skepticism and a scowl.

 "Manhattan," she elaborated, hoping he wasn’t (didn’t remember enough to be) as much of a borough snob as Steve. "Midtown, technically. Well, outside. This is Stark Tower, one of the safest places I know." When Tony planned the rather extensive repairs he included all sorts of wardings, whilst pestering her on  _why_  the squiggles kept bad things away and taking scans of absolutely everything. As much as she wanted to keep the mundane political and governmental side of things as separate as possible from the supernatural, it would not do to be stupidly unprepared.

 The parts of the city damaged by flying, shooting, and falling aliens had been rebuilt with a not inconsiderable amount of warding as well. Hey, if the Avengers and ninjas were going to help rebuild, they might as well take the opportunity to do it  _right_. (Even if that was a very subjective definition.)

 Still. Stark Tower was built to withstand attacks and explosions – because Tony might be an ass, but he was also too smart for his own good sometimes. And tended to blow things up a lot, intentionally or otherwise.

 "Stark," he repeated, testing the sound of the name.

 "Built by Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man, son of Howard Stark, who was involved in the project that created Captain America." Tony probably wouldn't like that particular description of his name, but Dawn was more concerned with hitting the relevant points that Barnes or the Winter Solider might have as reference.

 Barnes looked at her uncertainly, then gave a single short nod as his face dropped back into impassivity. He didn't ask why they were here. Questions didn't come easy to him, more so because  _talking_  seemed to be a lot for him. Not that she had encouraged much conversation, what with her frigid bitch act and then the roar of the wind on her motorcycle. Still, they were making progress. Baby steps. And dear stars, she was taking  _baby steps_  with a brainwashed assassin who didn't look nearly as geriatric as he should be. The scariest part was that this wasn't all that strange for her. There were a lot of people dropping in from the wrong time lately, and they all seemed to come with unsightly baggage.

 Unfortunately for Barnes, unidentified evil organizations and unwanted assassin personas were not as easy to get rid of as Knights of Hell or Wicked Witches. Not that either of those were strictly _easy_ – but with the right wood chipper, they were at least straightforward.

 The secret parking garage came equipped with a secret express elevator to the private floors at the top of the shining testament to Stark's ego. Much like the garage, the elevator was limited-access to Avengers and affiliates only, granting Dawn the highly valued experience of being in a small, brightly lit, metal box with an assassin with identity issues and unreliable programming.

 Admittedly, she had a few identity issues of her own, so she really couldn’t point fingers.

 "Welcome back to Stark Tower, Ms. Morrow. Are you aware that you companion is reported to have died in 1944?"

 Dawn resisted the urge to facepalm at the vocal intrusion as Barnes dropped into a defensive stance and tried to locate the unexpected voice.

 Tony was already annoying her, and he wasn't even in earshot yet. Well, not directly anyway. "Thank you, JARVIS. Please inform Stark that I am perfectly capable of vetting my own companions, thank you very much. Also convey my compliments on his ability to state the obvious and let him know that if he wants to  _actually_  be helpful, he can pull up anything he can find on the Winter Soldier, otherwise known as my friend Barnes here."

 The man in question gave her a sharp look but said nothing. One of the things he needed to work on was giving  _voice_  to what went through his head, because as diverse as her talents were, one thing Dawn  _wasn't_  was a mind-reader.

 "Of course," the AI replied politely. Not so surprisingly, considering JARVIS did  _everything_  politely.

 "That was JARVIS, Stark's artificial intelligence," she explained softly to the hair-triggered man beside her. How did one explain artificial intelligence to someone who'd been more or less out of the loop for the last seventy years? "He's pretty much his own person, but he's not –” actually, JARVIS  _acted_  pretty damn human, and her ninjas generated a fairly loose definition of the word "– he doesn't have a body. Stark created him. JARVIS is part of the building. You can't see him or touch him, but he's always around to help with stuff. Clint compared him to an invisible butler once."

 "A good butler  _is_  invisible," the disembodied voice said primly.

 "Yeah, well, I'm not convinced Clint meant it as a compliment. He also made Skynet and HAL references he claimed were obligatory," she remarked, smirking a little as she tried not to roll her eyes.

 "If I recall, the thermostat in Mr. Barton’s quarters malfunctioned shortly thereafter," JARVIS replied.

 Dawn laughed at the memory of Clint sleeping on the couch because he didn't want to ask Tony to fix the heat in his room. "JARVIS has spent  _way_  too much time with Stark, but that can't be helped I'm afraid. Thankfully, he's far more polite than Tony will ever be, even with Pepper riding herd on him." Barnes blinked. Ah, yes, the language barrier, she remembered with a repressed sigh. A lot of idioms were generational slang. "She supervises his behavior."

 "She his gal?" Barnes asked, slowly straightening.

 Dawn grinned openly. Yep. Still some of the 40's man in there. "You could say that, although as I understand it, there's been some debate over who belongs to whom. They're pretty evenly matched – it's the only way they can get through it all without killing each other."

 Stark was waiting for them when the elevator opened. " _Did_  you know he should have died in 1944? Because you never did actually answer the question. Also, assassin? Really? Isn't that a little mundane for you? You usually hang around godlike aliens or demonic aliens or alien-mutated humans, and a simple human assassin doesn't really compare. Unless aliens experimented on him. Huh. Is  _that_  why he's still kicking? As interesting as it would be to make a case for real live alien abductions, I don't know what that has to do with me."

 Her sigh was long and drawn out. "The egotistical, often abrasive motor-mouth is Tony Stark. He's pretty much naturally offensive, so try not to take anything he says personally, although I know from experience that can be difficult. My silent and deadly companion is James Barnes."

 "Yeah, I know. Bucky Barnes, Army Sergeant, Howling Commando, and Capsicle's BBF." Stark waved all that off as unimportant. "I'm more interested in why the Winter Soldier is standing in my living room. Reading his file was like looking at a dossier for the Terminator. You know he's killed SHIELD operatives, right? I mean, he shot Natasha. Not that I haven't wanted to do that a time or two, but I'm pretty sure Miss Thighs of Death is terrified of this guy. That might be a reason to keep him around actually. Does he do parties?"

 "Stark," she said warningly.

 "That's another thing – why am I back to Stark? I thought I was Tony."

 "You're being excessively annoying, therefore I am not on familiar terms with you," she replied with a self-satisfied smile.

 "Well,  _Agent Morrow_ , I find you annoying too. Do you have any idea what time it is?"

 She smirked. "I would have thought this was prime time for you. And you only know it's four in the morning because you just looked at the clock."

 "No, I didn't," Stark firmly denied. "I was admiring my fabulous wall in my fabulous room in my fabulous tower."

 "And you just happened to pick the exact part of the wall that had the clock?"

 "Maybe. Not the point. How did you even  _find_  the Winter Soldier? He's almost more of a ghost than you ever were. Didn’t think I looked you up, did you? Well, I did. Interesting speculation, but horribly flawed. No one knows what Morningstar was _really_ doing behind the scenes, but the level of incompetence in some of that . . ." He shuddered dramatically.

 “You had JARVIS summarize the reports, didn’t you?”

 “Yes, and? Idiocy sounds so much worse when read in his oh-so proper tones. I can’t tell if he’s mocking me or the idiots who wrote the stuff. It’s horrible.”

 Dawn snorted. “Well, I found Barnes yesterday in D.C. while finishing up a different lead and removed him from the custody of unknowns."

 Stark rolled his eyes. "You and your fancy spy lingo. Since Lux is supposedly off-planet and Morrow is supposed to be off-grid, this was one of your Ninja things?"

 "The lead, yes. I took care of that. The unknowns, not so much. From what I saw, their operation was a hundred percent human."

 Barnes blinked, having not yet processed that that wasn't a requirement around her. She shrugged. Explaining  _that_  little can of worms was sure to confuse him more.

 “Really?” Stark said brightly. “A Ninja target with an all-human operation?”

 “He wasn’t _working_ with them – he was _watching_ them,” she corrected. “They didn’t even know he was there. So, no, I will _not_ let you charge into a NINJAT op. Iron Man draws far too much attention.”

 "You’re no fun," Stark said, rolling his eyes. "Here. Why?"

 "You read the files didn't you? Don't think I don't know you could hack SHIELD in your sleep."

 "Their firewalls are a joke. I could have done better when I was twelve," he replied derogatively.

 "Electronic espionage wasn't really a thing when you were twelve."

 "It totally was a thing! It's always been a thing! Maybe, a really outdated, giant monstrosity of a thing, but still absolutely a thing."

 "If you say do."

 "I do. Say so. Computers are a thing. Anything that predates computers is too old to bother with."

 "So I should just take my robotically armed friend here and my alien science blood and leave? Since we’re both are too old to bother with?"

 Stark narrowed his eyes at her. "You're mean. A mean, cruel tease. Anyone ever tell you that? You're horrible. I don't know why I even put up with you."

 "I believe you are determined to find a way to reveal all the secrets of my heritage because I can make your fancy toys think I'm normal."

 "You are not normal," Stark countered. "Farthest thing from it. Well, maybe Thor's the farthest thing from normal. But he's got a girlfriend, and they're sickeningly domestic. So that. And you are so not normal. You're like, abnormal. Abby Normal. What can I do for you and Robo-Cop, Abby?"

 "Never call us that again," she replied with a deadly smile.

 Stark wasn't impressed. "I faced down terrorists, senators, aliens, and a girlfriend who can barbeque me. You're not that scary. Good try though. You do intimidating well. Are you taking lessons? Who teaches those seminars, Fury or Red?"

 "I'm sure Nat would love to stab you again, if you keep going," she remarked idly.

 "Eh. Okay. Fine. So, what can I do for you and Soul Surfer?"

 "I was kinda hoping you'd take a look at his arm, figure out who made it, make sure it's working right, take out the trackers and kill switches I disabled."

 Stark grinned broadly. "Don't worry, I'll be nice when I play doctor with your boyfriend."

 ***

 Barnes did not like the lab. He didn't say a thing, but he walked stiffly, haltingly, confusion and apprehension writ deep in every line of his body.

 As ridiculous as it was to think, it was a good thing Stark kept his workspace as, uh,  _eccentric_  as he did. Of all the things there were to say about the state of his lab, it was undeniable that it was nothing like the barren, blank, white spaces of the building she'd sprung Barnes from. So as uncomfortable as her impossible assassin was in "lab" spaces, he was a bit more removed from any direct memories. So his increasingly wired tension wasn't  _as_  bad as it could have been.

 Of course, it was a little hard to account for semi-sentient robots.

 Barnes froze when the mechanical arm on wheels approached, his eyes going blank. Warning bells started ringing in Dawn’s head even as Stark waved him off, moving to intercept the bot.

 "Shoo, Dummy, no, no one wants a toxic smoothie, I mean it, go awAAHHH!”

 Whether it was Dum-E or Stark who spooked him, she didn’t know. Either way, Dawn collided with Barnes – no, the _Winter Soldier_ – as soon as he moved. The Winter Soldier moved with a deadly fluidity and purpose, but her momentum caught him off balance and they tumbled to the floor. As he promptly rolled to gain the upper hand, she twisted away, pushing herself to her feet between him and the rest of the room.

 "Barnes," she said, firmly but quietly as he sprang up into a crouch, focusing on her as the threat. " _James_. Stand down."

 He blinked. "Dawn?" he asked hesitantly, standing up. Thank the stars he recognized her.

 "Yeah, it's me. You're safe here. There's no one here you need to defend yourself against."

 Shaking his head in confusion, he stepped closer. Slowly, telegraphing every movement, she laid a hand on his flesh arm. "You're safe here," she repeated. When the acute wariness faded from beneath her hand, she let herself relax.

 "Well that was fun," Stark quipped. “Dummy, this is your fault. I know he’s got a robo-arm and it’s quite frankly awesome and I haven’t even gotten a good look at it yet, but you couldn’t keep it in your pants and unleashed the Terminator. Fortunately for all of us, name-confused aliens beat name-confused assassins, thank you Kyria-Dawn.”

 She glared.

 “Sorry about that, Bourne,” Stark continued, ignoring her as usual. “Dummy's harmless. Slight design flaw that he's more nuisance than help and I keep saying I’m going to cut my losses and donate him to a city college one of these days, but he means well, even if he has a bad fire extinguisher habit.”

 Barnes blinked.

 “The sad part is,” Dawn said mournfully, “you really do get used to him.”

 ***

 


	4. Chapter 4

With more respect than he usually had for personal boundaries, Stark quickly scanned Barnes' entire upper body and pulled up a holographic representation.

 “Biology’s not really my thing,” Stark pointed out, playing with the image, “that’s what I have Bruce for, but he’s off visiting the ex, which I don’t actually understand, I don’t do the whole ‘ex’ thing – I had fun, and now I have Pepper.”

 “So Pepper’s not fun?” Dawn asked, raising an eyebrow.

 “What? No! Of course she is, she’s Pepper. Everyone should have a Pepper. Not _my_ Pepper though – she’s mine. I don’t share well, really don’t play well with others much either. Starks don’t as a rule. The Avengers are an anomaly – they’re great, but they’re not how I usually operate.”

 “Which certainly explains how you manage to forget to call them in for little things like _houses falling into the ocean_ ,” she pointed out.

 “Oh, give it a rest already. That got old five minutes into the first time you yelled at me. Actually no, more like as soon as it happened, which was _before_ you ever yelled at me. You’re just rehashing ancient history – “

 “ _Ancient_ history?”

 “You’re ancient, it’s history.”

 “I don’t know why I put up with you.”

 “Cause I make phones you can’t break and motorcycles that do one else can drive – I’m working on crossing your motorcycle with those flying chariot things so the whole thing can fly though not as awesomely as my suit – and allow you to bring compromised assassins into my sanctum so they can try to kill me when my hopeless heaps of faulty coding spook him. No one else does that. Bruce would take one look at that scarring and go green. Then you’d have two WMDs to handle. Although based on past performance with Jolly Green on Fury's flying pirate ship and the subsequent flying aliens, my money’s on you. Whichever ‘you’ you feel like being that day.”

 “ _Stark_ ,” she said with no little exasperation.

  _“Morrow_ ,” he copied before, “It is Morrow today, yes? Dawn Morrow, not Kyria Lux or Orion or Morningstar or . . . I actually don’t have another or. Too many names. Doesn’t matter. What matters is _this._ ” The hologram abruptly tripled in size, several points highlighted in red.

 She sighed. “That’s about what I figured. I killed the trackers first thing, but can you take that stuff out?”

 “Can I take that stuff out? Is that a _question?_ Really? Do you think so little of me?”

 “Spare us the theatrics, will you?”

 Stark pouted but got to work.

 Barnes still looked about as comfortable as a porcupine in a balloon factory, but he didn't try to attack anything or anyone, so Dawn was willing to count it as a win. She used the brief respite to call the Tech Twins and give them the go-ahead on hacking into the base she’d liberated Barnes from.

 Stark looked up sharply. "You haven't hacked them yet? Why the hell not?"

 "Oh, you know, having a group of gun-toting bad guys track me and their lost weapon to the suburbs sounded like a great plan. As did them tracking Charlie to the bunker of Everything Supernatural."

 "Point," Stark granted, flicking a finger at her. Barnes flinched and Dawn put her hand on his flesh arm to steady him as Stark worked on removing a collection of nasty little surprises from the metal one. "But your hacking-geek-delay? Means I’ve no background to work with. No idea who had access to this remarkable piece of tech.”

 “You built a flying suit of armor out of scraps in a cave,” Dawn pointed out. “I have complete trust in your engineering genius.”

 Stark preened under the compliment. He was then promptly distracted by the intricacies of Barnes’ arm.

 "This is amazingly impossible. Impossibly amazing? There is no way the Russians gave him this arm in the 40s. The tech is more advanced than half of what's available  _today_ , let allow 1945. I could probably do better," he added, finishing with Barnes’ actual arm and switching back to studying the holographic overlaps mapping the interior connections before the Winter Soldier made a repeat appearance. "But I need to figure out what they did first. Your hackers can help with that. I'll even have JARVIS help them, whattaya say, J?"

 "Certainly, sir," the AI replied.

 “Excellent. Awesome prosthetics, soon-to-be less-than-not-so-awesome background. It’s not even my birthday,” Stark said with a cocky grin.

 "Just don't blow up your lab again,” Dawn retorted, remembering his last birthday. “Actually, where's your babysitter?"

 "I do not have a babysitter. I am an adult."

 "Coulda fooled me," she muttered softly. The corner of Barnes' mouth twitched.

 "What was that?" Stark demanded, narrowing his eyes.

 "What's Pepper up to?" she supplied guilelessly.

 "Uh huh. Don't think I don't know what you're doing, Orion."

 "What am I up to?" she asked innocently.

 "Conspiring with my girlfriend behind my back. Well, you're out of luck – she's in California for some business thingy. She'll be back next week."

 "Doesn't that mean  _you're_  out of luck?"

 "I'm the only one allowed to be a smart ass in my lab. You, out! No, not you!" he yelled in frustration at the bot trying to make for the door. "Honestly, you're as bad as Dum-E sometimes!" Dawn covered her laugh with her hand. Stark turned back to glare at her. "I mean it – shoo. I have bots to discipline and the mysteries of the Terminator's arm to unravel."

 With a mocking bow, Dawn grabbed Barnes by the arm and left Stark to his robotics.

 ***

 Somewhat at a loss for what to do with an assassin who wasn’t comfortable enough to sleep, she set Barnes up on the couch in front of the very large television and queued up Darcy’s Welcome to the Future movie selection. Barnes had a better grasp of current technology and culture than Steve had when Darcy made that list, but Dawn highly doubted he _actually_ knew what was happening in the world.

 As useful as it was for a brainwashed assassin to be able to assimilate enough to blend into a crowd, he didn’t have to _know_ what was going on, what he was doing, or why.

 Letting out a slow, cleansing breath – she didn’t have a proper target for her righteous fury – Dawn ordered pizza. Barnes liked pizza. Crashing on the chair next to her recovering brainwashed soldier, Dawn pulled the ninja boards up on her phone and asked Agent Harper to get her fellow Amazon-Agents to quietly sift through SHIELD’s files for anything and everything related to the Winter Soldier. She then asked them the forward the request to their sisters in other agencies. SHIELD had the greatest number, due both to their interest in “extraordinary” people and Dawn’s influence, but there were at least two in the FBI, the younger of whom had gotten in touch with Henriksen last year after the tribe’s redirection.

 “Orion.”

 “Hmm?” She looked up from the Amazon page of the ninja boards.

 “He called you Orion,” Barnes said slowly.

 “It’s one of the names I’ve been called,” she agreed, not quite sure how much he knew about the Avengers. “I’m not _quite_ a hunter,” she continued amicably, “but I’m changing what hunters do, and for the most part they follow me, so it’s a good name.”

 Barnes blinked twice at her, then refocused on the documentary on the hippie movement just in time for the stoned flower child on the big-ass screen to hold two fingers up and proclaim, “Make love, not war.”

 Dawn thought about the red Mustang in the garage in Alexandria and repressed both a shudder and the urge to call forth her sword to check that the gold ring was still there beside its two brothers.

 “Gabriel save me from turning into Bilbo,” she muttered irritably. Freezing in place, her eyes darted around the room, but the archangel had not appeared. Not that that meant anything. “That was not an invitation to give me hairy feet or anything,” she added sharply.

 Dark eyes flickered back to the television. Great. Give her brain-scrambled assassin reasons to doubt her sanity. “You’ll understand when you meet my uncle,” she told Barnes.

 He gave no indication that he heard her.

 With a sigh, she turned her attention to what information she had on Bucky Barnes and the Winter Soldier. A brief review of the files she’d read two years ago when Steve defrosted and she’d joined his team confirmed that everyone who’d known Bucky back then – from Dugan and Morita to Carter and Philips – was dead, although most married and had a few kids and grandkids in the interim. Well, Steve wasn’t, but she didn’t know which of the two a meeting as Barnes was now would hurt more. She wanted to wait until Barnes was a little more grounded before giving him that blast from the past.

 She expanded her search though, because when Steve inevitably found out, she wanted to be able to tell him _something_ about how his best friend survived to the twenty-first century looking remarkably well preserved.

 The ding of the elevator right before Stark came barging in caught her sorting through reports from HYDRA prisoners during WWII.

 "You'd can't do anything small, can you?" Stark demanded. "I actually think you might be worse than me. I did not think that was possible, but then JARVIS told me what he and your hackers found and I'm not entirely sure I believe that either. It sounds kinda like the plot to a bad movie. Actually, I should just pick a screenwriter and call them up because it has to be better than more than half the crap currently in theaters."

 "Get to the point," Dawn said with exasperation.

 On cue, her phone rang.

 "More proof of bad screenplays." Stark raised his eyebrows. "The timing of that would be perfect in a movie."

 Rolling her eyes, Dawn grabbed for her phone.

 "Is this Deli D'Os?" asked a female voice.

 "Voted #1 for fresh bagels," Dawn replied, cheerfully chirpy voice belying how tense she’d become. "How can we help you?"

 "Can I order a triple baker’s dozen for delivery?”

 "Of course. What kind of bagels made fresh every day would you like?" Stark opened his mouth and she cut him off with a rude gesture.

 “Twelve each of onion and everything, three cinnamon raisin, five poppy seed, six egg, and a plain please.”

 "Anything else?" Dawn asked, straining to keep the air-headed bimbo voice even.

 "I'll also take a tub of garlic and herb cream cheese."

 "Good choice. Our cream cheese is hand-made by the owner. When and where would you like us to deliver our fabulous fresh bagels?"

 "My preferences should be on file. The name for the order is M. Tayne."

 “Let me just – yes I have your information right here. Thank you for being one of Deli D'Os preferred customers, Ms. Tayne. Your order will be ready on time and as requested or there’s no charge! Have a great day!"

 Dawn hung up the phone and hung her head back. Opening her eyes, she met Stark's wide eyed stare. 

 "Seriously. What. The. Fuck? Did you just take an order for  _bagels?_ That was fancy spy code, wasn't it? What was it fancy spy code  _for?"_

 "Someone just tried to kill Nicholas Fury."

 Stark actually  _blinked_. "Someone tried to kill the cyclops? Not that I'm all that surprised, given his ever sunny disposition, but you got that from  _bagels?"_

 "The best codes are innocuous."

 "I may never look at a bagel the same way," he said shaking his head.

 Dawn rolled her eyes. “SHIELD’s got tons of contingency codes. That one was between Fury, Hill, and Lux. I may be missing some of the finer details, but triple baker’s dozen means someone tried to kill Fury. That's kinda hard to mistake. Fury authorized use of the code, but there's a leak in SHIELD so he's playing dead to investigate - can't kill someone who's already dead. The poppy-egg-plain combo is a weird contingency that basically means ‘we don’t know who did this or who to trust, so don’t make waves.’ Fury’s a teensy bit paranoid. With reason apparently.”

 "And the cream cheese?"

 "I have to make the DNA test on the corpse read positive."

 "That's . . . elaborate."

 "Never thought I'd see the day Tony Stark was speechless. You recording this, JARVIS?" she called out.

 "Of course. A copy is being forwarded to Ms. Potts. She left standing orders in the event of such a momentous occasion."

 Stark sent a glare to the ceiling. "Traitor! Colluding with the enemy, J, that's what you're doing. See if I ever give  _you_  an upgrade."

 "I was not aware you had reclassified Ms. Potts as an enemy, Sir. I will be sure to alert her to her change in status."

 "What?!" he yelped. "Don't you dare, JARVIS!"

 Dawn snickered.

 "And you!" Stark whirled on her, pointing a finger accusingly. "Beloved Morning, don't think I didn't notice that phone. That was one of the phones I replaced. How on earth did you go through twelve of  _my_  phones in five months? Those were Thor-proof phones. And you went through  _twelve_  of them."

 "I still have three," she offered.

 "Three. So you killed  _nine_  of my best StarkPhones? You haven’t killed any recently. Did you decide to stop being a techno-hazard when you were fake-hiding on Asgard?"

 "I was trying to make this work."

 "Make what work?" he demanded.

 She pulled a phone out of thin air.

 "Place tell me you got that, J!"

 "My apologies, Sir. I was only able to run a partial scan."

 Stark crossed his arms. "How'd you do it?" he demanded. "I was under the impression it was only swords and feathers you could tuck away into your pockets of not-so-theoretical zero-space."

 She grinned. "I wanted to stop dropping my phone. Even unbreakable, it was annoying. So I molded a sword into a phone case."

 "And it took nine phones to make it work?" he asked pointedly.

 "Nope. Making the case was pretty easy. Making it so that the phone survived the dematerialization on the other hand . . ."

 "So about that rumor that you had a working phone on Asgard?"

 "I did. It's why Orion could get away with hiding there."

 " _That_  is something I need to get readings on. I could turn it into my marketing slogan: the phone that works on other planets."

 She snorted. "I think that was more me than it was your phone. And didn't you come up here to tell me what you found?"

 She started worrying when he hesitated. "Um. The geeky ninjas are of the opinion that someone else is in SHIELD's mainframe. JARVIS agreed."

 "Don't you hack SHIELD all the time? How is this different?" Because Stark wouldn't be this uncomfortable if it was just someone else hacking them.

 "JARVIS couldn't identify whoever it was."

 Dawn was taken aback. "JARVIS couldn't? I didn't think there was anything JARVIS couldn't do."

 "I am somewhat hampered by a lack of hands," the sentient computer system noted.

 "Well, obviously. Besides that, I mean." She gave the billionaire engineer a piercing look. "That's why you let the conversation wander. You didn't want to admit someone beat JARVIS." He opened to mouth to protest, but she shook her head and moved on. “What do we know?"

 He narrowed his eyes at her briefly before slipping back into his usual persona. "J and the twins traced the signal to somewhere in Jersey – where'd you say it was?"

 "Camp Lehigh, Ms. Morrow. It is currently an abandoned Army base, but during World War Two, Captain Rogers trained there prior to undergoing Project Rebirth."

 "Coincidences aren't," she said absently, furiously trying to connect the dots. Unfortunately she was still missing at least half the pieces.

 "What was that?" Stark – almost, not quite having earned back 'Tony' yet – questioned.

 "I find Steve's best friend and he's held by people holding shop in Steve's old training grounds? That is a bit too much of a coincidence to sit well with me. Not with my history. Something is rotten in Denmark and I am going to find out what," she declared.

 "I have taken the liberty of mapping out the best route to get there," JARVIS offered.

 "I appreciate it," Dawn said genuinely. Things weren't adding up and if she wanted answers she was going to have to hunt them down. Fortunately, now she knew where to look next. She turned the person who hadn't said a word since the discussion began. "Hey, Barnes, how would you feel a trip to New Jersey?"

 ***


	5. Chapter 5

She made it look so easy. Her and Stark.

 Stark – the name tickled something deep in the dark recesses of his mind – called her by a different name nearly every time he addressed her. Lux and Morrow and Orion and Sparky and Kyria and Abby and so many others. She responded to them all, but gave her name as Dawn. She admitted Orion was hers as well, which meant at least some of what Stark called her was her.

 But Stark had called _him_ a number of things as well. He didn’t know most of what Stark called him, but then he didn’t know what Dawn and his research said he was either.

 He didn't know what to call himself.

 He didn’t _know_ himself, except to know most of the pieces had been whittled away.

  _(only have been lost)_

_(help you try to find what remains)_

_(part of you)_

 She said he was James and Bucky and Sergeant and Barnes and Soldier. She said he was all of them and none of them. The websites gave his name as James Buchanan Barnes, called Bucky. He almost thought James and Sergeant were pieces of Bucky, but he didn’t know Bucky. He couldn't remember ever calling himself or being called that. She called him Barnes and, once, James. Bucky was the name used in the obituary for the man with his face. He knew when she said Barnes she meant him, but he also responded when she said Winter Soldier.

 On some level he thought he was all of them and none of them. Bucky Barnes was a hero; the Winter Soldier was a weapon. Bucky Barnes was dead; the Winter Soldier was a blank slate.

 Whoever, whatever he was, he wasn't dead – his heat beat, his lungs moved air in and out. He also wasn't as blank as he had been. He could  _remember_  the blankness, the mindless obedience that existed within him when she walked into his life and said that she had a mission for him and he couldn't be seen. He could remember the unquestioning  _certainty_  that for her to be there with a mission she was supposed to be there even though he had never seen her before. He couldn't remember being a hero. He couldn't even remember falling, although history said he fell. He couldn't remember exactly what he had done with the last sixty eight years, but he remembered the feel of guns recoiling in his hands, both loud and muffled. It was a comforting weight, and part of him was glad she had allowed him a gun this trip, not wanting him unarmed in potentially enemy territory.

 Another part of him was uncomfortable it was so comfortable. It was good to be able to defend himself (and her) but he wasn't certain that he knew what the threats were.

 He didn't know why he tried to kill Stark, just that he  _needed_  to. And then something hit him and he hit the floor and then Dawn was calling him James.

 He was glad she stopped him, helped him, refocused him on  _now_ , when he was himself (whoever that was) and not a weapon. Not _just_ a weapon. He wasn't the Winter Soldier. Not anymore, or at least not completely. She called him James, and he remembered that he wasn't a blank weapon anymore.

 James sounded wrong in his head. Like it wasn't really his name, like he wasn't supposed to be called that. The computer usually called the man with his face Bucky, implied that most people called the man with his face Bucky. He couldn't remember anyone ever calling him Bucky, but James sounded all right in her voice.

 Her voice was in his head now, whispering to the dark spaces, saying things like  _remember_ and  _rebuild_ and  _someone to help_  and  _you survived_ and _surprisingly hopeful_.

  _(In the depth of winter when nothing but hope and virtue could survive.)_

 He wanted to believe that.

 He didn't know what of that to believe, but he preferred her voice to some of the others in there. The screams and the crying and the shouting and the orders and the  _ice_.

 The emotionless voice he attributed to the Winter Soldier whispered back that Dawn was a mask to lower defenses because Orion was one of the names of the Avengers, as dangerous as the Winter Soldier in her own right.

 He argued back that she didn't  _use_  whatever dangerousness she possessed. Sure she was occasionally antagonistic with Stark, but he responded with the same and seemed to delight in it. A weak, unused voice in the back of his mind described their interactions as those of  _friends._

 She called him a friend.

 He had walked out of the room where the weapon was kept because she told him to and he followed orders. He sat at a computer and discovered the man with his face for the same reason. And because she showed him the ruins of what might have been his life, he held tight to her waist as she rode the roads in darkness to the man who used words as armor and misdirection and the voice without a face. And because he wanted to know who killed –  _lost_  – the man with his face and put a blank weapon in his place, he got back on her motorcycle – the cold voice analyzed its capabilities and weaknesses and failed to match it to any known model – and followed her to an abandoned military base in Jersey.

 It was the flat voice of the Winter Soldier that pointed out that United Stated Army regulations forbid storing munitions within five hundred yards of the barracks and therefore there was a building out of place. After a moment of hesitation, he relayed the information to Dawn.

 She looked surprised and raised her eyebrows at him, but all she said was, "Huh. Let's check it out, shall we?"

 He was grateful she didn't ask, that she asked something else instead, that she asked instead of ordered. The Winter Soldier said she was just like all the others, but she couldn't be the same because  _he_  wasn't the same. Even if he didn't know what he was yet. Or even who he was.

 The building that was out of place seemed to be a long-abandoned office rather than an ammunition storage shed.  _Camouflage_ , the Winter Soldier whispered from the corner of his mind.  _Look like something else, something that belongs._

 Dawn stopped in front of a wall with a logo of a bird. It looked familiar.

 "SHIELD."

 He wasn't sure if the voice was hers or the Winter Soldier's until she continued. "This must be where SHIELD began. Makes sense," she mused aloud, "SHIELD sprang up from the old SSR and they were behind Project Rebirth. You'd think they would've hidden their secret base better, though."

 He silently agreed. A base that anyone with a knowledge of Army regulations could spot wasn't very well hidden. It should have worried him more that he didn't know if that thought was his or the Soldier's.

 In a room that looked to have served in an administrative capacity, a row of framed photographs hung on the wall. He recognized the faces from his research and wished he could remember ever meeting any of them. Again it was the Soldier who noticed the bookcases were misaligned, but it was Dawn who determined the code to unlock the elevator.

 The room they came out into was dark, but he could see, even before the lights slowly flickered on. The Winter Soldier scanned the room from behind his eyes, locating potential blind spots and protected areas, reeling off technical details on what he knew was ancient computer equipment without knowing how he knew. It was a feeling he had had a lot since punching Dawn's bathroom mirror but was still as disconcerting as ever. He was just getting better as ignoring it.

 Dawn examined the room in confusion. "This can't be the source of the signal that gave JARVIS and the Twins the run-around. It's too old and no one's been here in ages." Then she stopped and moved closer to the central computer panel. "Maybe not ages," she corrected thoughtfully, picking up a sleek, dust-free USB hub that looked out of place on the desk.

 The motion must have activated something, because suddenly all the machinery in the room came to life and the main computer asked, "Initiate system?"

 Dawn looked uneasy. He didn't know what he felt or should feel. Abruptly relaxing her shoulders and smiling ever so slightly, Dawn typed Y-E-S.

 "Shall we play a game?"

 She didn't seem to be speaking to him, so he didn't reply. It was just as well, he didn't have an answer anyway. The smile felt  _wrong_  somehow, and yet it fit her, and the Winter Soldier was whispering _dangerous_ in the back of his mind again.

 The old-fashioned security camera attached to the computer panel shifted to focus on them.  _Now_  he began to feel uneasy as the hair on the back of his neck rose.

 The computer screen whirred to life, static-ed pixels clearing to reveal what looked to be a face. "Morrow, Dawn, born 1984," said a computerized voice. "And the Winter Soldier, my greatest creation."

 Dawn tensed immediately, a spooked wariness in the line of her shoulders though she made no move for her gun. "That is  _not_  a recording."

 "You are correct, Fraulein," the face in the computer said. "I may not be the man I was when the Captain took me prisoner in 1945, but I am. And I thank you for returning the Fist of HYDRA.  _Welcome home, my Soldier_."

 He heard her swift intake of breathe, but distantly as his body locked up and stopped being his.

 The Winter Soldier stayed where he was, watching the Thief glance between him and the computer.

 "Arnim Zola," she guessed, failing to stay composed. It was a weakness. Emotions were a weakness, as was the inability to hide them.

 "Correct again."

 She squared her shoulders. "I don't know how you got here, but he's not your soldier anymore."

 "Incorrect, I am afraid. Shoot her."

 The gun was in his hand and firing before she could do more than turn towards him in surprise. There was a shrill buzzing noise, almost like someone screaming from far away, but the Asset ignored it the same way he ignored anything distracting from The Mission.

 The Thief's eyes widened as her body jerked back. She stepped back but couldn't compensate for the unbalancing recoil of the point blank shot, and her legs collapsed from under her.

 The Winter Soldier watched dispassionately as she tried to recover her facilities after the fall, but her eyes were dilated with pain, her hands moving instinctively towards the hole in her abdomen, deep red already soaking into the black of the sweatshirt. There was no need to waste a second bullet. The Voice had not ordered him to kill her yet after all, although the first might do so without adequate medical care. The Voice had not ordered him to let her live, either. Such orders, when issued, where invariably temporary at best.

 "The Clairvoyant wants you alive for questioning, Agent Morrow, but whether you live to meet him depends on you."

 Her hands moved over her stomach as the Thief breathed heavily. "Is that so?" she asked, voice oddly level for the aftermath of a gunshot.

 It was the only warning the Asset had for the flash of light that caused his muscles to seize up. It felt like The Chair, except cleaner. Except there was no chair here. Weakness or not, he could not prevent his knees from crashing into the floor.

 "What did you do to him?"

 "Modified Taser."

 He struggled to breathe, fighting to clear the sparks from his vision as the aftershocks abated. That  _hurt_. But he wasn't solely the Winter Soldier anymore, so he couldn't complain. Especially after –  _oh God._ He'd shot her. No, no no. He couldn't – she was the only support he had, a flimsy crutch keeping him from drowning in the voices and memories and darkness and cold.  _And he shot her_.

 So much for hope and virtue.

 As he watched, Dawn tucked a gun-like weapon away and climbed to her feet. "Nice try. But did you really think I'd have given him a gun if I hadn't taken precautions? There's some nice body armor available these days."

  _Body armor?_  But . . . he could see the blood staining her clothes. That . . . couldn't be true. Even if she was wearing armor, it failed to stop the bullet. But she  _wasn't._  The motorcycle had pressed him against her back. He would have felt body armor. The Winter Soldier definitely would have noticed. So, a bluff? Pretend she was fine – for what purpose? He wanted to ask, but couldn't because then the voice in the computer – Zola – would know she was lying. The voice was dangerous enough as it was.

 "HYDRA has other ways of reclaiming its weapon."

 "History says HYDRA died with its leader," Dawn countered. "The Red Skull died shortly after your capture."

 "Cut off one head, two more shall take its place," Zola told her, his image duplicating.

 "If that's the case, what have you been doing for the past seventy years?"

 "Accessing archive."

 As the whir of the machinery picked up, he pushed himself back to his feet, body still tingling from whatever she hit him with. The weapon in her hand that had since disappeared had been an ordinary gun, same as the one he – the Winter Soldier – had used. The Winter Soldier voice knew what a Taser was, and even modified it wouldn't look like a standard handgun.  _Orion uses lightning_ , it whispered to him. He tried to ignore it, push it away. That was the voice that shot her.

 Unfortunately, it had information – and a point. His research indicated the real name of Orion the Avenger was not known. But if Computer-Zola could identify Dawn, surely he could identify Orion? Or find Orion’s other name(s)? Was this what she meant by complicated? Zola knew her as Morrow, not Orion, but it was Orion (not Morrow?) who had subdued the Winter Soldier.

 He only had half an ear on Zola as the computer spoke about humanity and freedom and war and how SHIELD had recruited him after the war. His fragmented mind tried to make sense of the whispers that Orion was SHIELD, so surely they knew her name?

 The pictures on the screen suddenly turned into  _him_  and he froze, voices abruptly going silent.

 "How did SHIELD not notice HYDRA in their midst?" Dawn demanded, sounding shaken. It sounded wrong.

 "Accidents will happen," came the response, displaying news about the death of the Starks – Dawn's Stark's parents – before ending with a picture of a black man with an eye patch whose file read "deceased." "Our weapon helps those accidents occur."

 His head blanked again.  _He_  had killed Dawn's (friend) Stark's parents?

 Dawn snorted derisively. "Really? HYDRA used a sniper to crash a car? Just how desperate  _were_  you? Actually, how are you in the computer?"

 "In 1972 I received a terminal diagnosis," the computerized voice replied. "Science could not save my body. My mind, however, was worth saving – on two hundred thousand feet of data banks. You are standing in my brain."

 "And SHIELD  _recruited_ you after the war," Dawn said in disgust, shaking her head. "I know a lot of people who would call this the foulest blasphemy, but  _fuck_ science. HYDRA's in SHIELD and they were  _invited_. How deep into SHIELD does it go?"

 "Very. HYDRA created a world so chaotic that humanity is finally ready to sacrifice its freedom to gain its security. Once the purification process is complete, HYDRA's new World Order will arise."

 The accompanying images changed from rioting and security cameras to satellites and some sort of military aircraft the Winter Soldier voice didn't recognize. Apparently Dawn  _did_ because she went still at the sight.

 "The new Helicarriers," she breathed. "HYDRA's going to hijack the new Helicarriers."

 "Correct again," the mechanized voice replied. "Unfortunately you shall be too dead to do anything to stop it."

 He spun at the sound of the blast doors sealing shut, but was too far to be able to stop it. Dawn had her phone in her hand.

 "Short-range ballistic." Pause. "Fired by SHIELD."

 The Winter Soldier supplied details on what a short-range ballistic missile was capable of. More than enough firepower to destroy the building with them in it.

 Her shoulders relaxed again and the phone vanished from her hand between one blink and the next. Dawn calmly turned to look directly at the security camera that served as Zola's eyes. "You need to do better than that to kill the Morningstar," she said in an icily amused voice.

 Before Zola could say anything in response, the wall behind his computer-face dissolved into flame and destruction. He instinctively ducked, trying to make himself smaller, less of a target. The air around him heated, the building collapsing over him. Something bumped into his shoulder, but gently. He looked up. And stared.

 Dawn stood tall beside him, arms spread wide, tongues of dancing white-blue lightning spreading out from her body, following the curve of her arms to wrap into a protective net, shielding the two of them from fire and rubble.

 It was hard to tell from the angle he was at, but . . . the lightning looked to form the shape of wings.

 


	6. Chapter 6

Group projects were the bane of her existence.

  _Oh, it's a brave new world, Emma. Oh, we need to adapt to the twenty-first century, Emma. Oh, you need to go to college, Emma._

 Did anyone mention that she'd be having a group meeting via Skype at one o'clock in the morning because Jeff was highly contagious and Melissa had gone home to California for the weekend? Not that they were getting much accomplished because Melissa spent half the time gossiping with Helen and, as sore as his throat was, Jeff failed at keeping them on topic. Yay group work.

 Who needed to talk statistics when it had been seventy degrees on the west coast and Melissa ran into the cute guy down the block while out buying a ridiculously over-priced syrupy drink? It wasn’t like Emma even _needed_ a group for this assignment. But she _did_ need to be able to work with humans.

 There was a knock on the door to the apartment. Who wanted to see them at this hour? If it was RA Kyle again about a noise complaint, she was going to  _kill_  Olivia downstairs. Well, no, killing was bad. Terrorize, maybe. She could probably get away with terrorizing. Especially if she used some of her tricks on the nuisance with annoying sensitive ears. Red eyes outside the window in the dead of night was sure to send just about anyone running away screaming. And then Olivia wouldn't be around to complain when her upstairs neighbors practiced sparring in the middle of the afternoon. Really, if anyone should get complained about, it should be Mike upstairs with what sounded like a tap-dancing elephant at all hours or Jeff down the hall making the whole floor smell like pot.

 Maybe not Jeff, actually. Last time she’d gone home, Jo had confiscated the foul-smelling drug for her friend Ash, who apparently thought up an angel-tracking code while riding the high. Not that Jeff knew about angels, or Ash, or even what happened to his pot. Jo was more than capable of picking a lock and not getting caught braking into another student’s room.

 Hunters did have some useful skills after all.

 And Jo would absolutely go along with getting Olivia out of their hair, but Emma’s mother wouldn't approve of such behavior, and Madeline would be  _furious_ that she endangered them that way.

 That's when her father – _her father!_ – would call Madeline a miserable old bat because people are idiots and why would the bitchy neighbor suspect Emma was the owner of the red eyes?

 It was fun to think about, but she didn't think she'd ever actually do it. Too many ways for that sort of thing to go wrong. And it would be much easier, if not quite as satisfying, to plant some of Jeff’s pot in Olivia’s room come the next Healthy and Safety Check.

 On the other hand, flashing some red eyes she could conceivably blame on some technological glitch might be a great way to get out of the useless chat conversation though. Still, she was better than that. Emma was a proud warrior and would not let college break her. Especially not when she was indirectly responsible for her generation being an experiment in the Value of Tradition.

 She debated using the door as a viable, non-endangering excuse to ditch the video chat, but her roommate called out, "I got it."

 So much for that idea. Ugh. Why was Jo even awake at this hour? Stupid, perkily awake hunter.

 Well, not true. For all that Jo was a hunter and Emma had some genetically ingrained prejudices against hunters, they generally got along great. Jo treated Emma like the little sister she claimed she always wanted, Emma got someone with an insider’s knowledge on the strangely changed world of hunters and aliens her Amazon heritage didn’t prepare her for, and both got a roommate they didn’t have to hide weapons and other strange habits from.

 There'd been a few minor issues about the all whole freshman undergrad rooming with a grad student thing, but her mother had gone on about religious beliefs until the school caved. After all that, she'd  _better_ get along with her roommate, because she wasn't getting a different one.

 It did help to have someone she didn’t have to keep her life a secret from though. Someone who understood some of the weirdness that came from trying to fit in with people who walked around oblivious to the world around them and couldn't understand the _real_ meaning of "different." Granted, Jo had nowhere near the same problems she did, but she knew about them and was surprisingly helpful for an outsider, and a hunter at that.

 Not that hunters were necessarily a bad thing anymore. Hunters made up the backbone of the "ninja" network that the Amazons were now a part of. The tribe wasn't what it used to be, and while there was argument over whether the new or old ways were better, it was agreed that they follow the new ways for now, because Morningstar was a figure in the game, and the tribe had crossed paths with the Christian Apocalypse, and both of those were connected. No one wanted to cross the Morningstar. Especially since she was one of seven who had stopped an  _alien army_. Emma hadn't been born at the time, but she'd seen some of the documentaries on and video clips of the battle. It was  _intense_. And Orion was a badass.

  _Not_ someone the tribe wanted as an enemy. So they accepted her lead and her limitations, and Emma became the first Amazon in a  _very_ long time to have a living father. Who she talked to. Who she actually had a lot in common with. Who she was very glad she hadn't had to kill.

 Emma was an anomaly among her tribe, even before her great-grandfather apparently ran out of a closet door, bringing more revelations with him.

 Some of the matrons had heard of the Men of Letters – “More sophisticated hunters,” they said – and were curious about what Emma represented for their future. There was a divide on whether Lydia should be punished for endangering the tribe or praised for picking such a powerful line to sire a daughter of Harmonia.

 Well, with the Morningstar looking over their shoulders, they could hardly do anything to Emma’s mother, but she knew some of them thought about it.

 Amazons weren’t supposed to know which member of the tribe gave birth to them either! But Emma knew, because her father knew, which was not something she wanted to think too much about actually. But she had a mother, and a father, and thus the attention of the tribe matrons.

 Jo often said she thought someone had cursed them all with an old Chinese proverb. Emma generally thought she wasn't far off.

 And speaking of Jo – she heard her roommate talking quietly with someone, and she was almost positive there was a third person with them.

 "Who is it, Jo?" she asked, turning away from the group chat she wasn't paying very much attention to.

 "Dawn and a friend of hers."

 Dawn? Who – oh dear. It was all she could do to keep her eyes from bugging out of her skull. Dawn was the Morningstar’s other identity. Talk about speak of the devil – Emma nearly choked on an ill-advised laugh.

 "Sorry guys, I need to go." Excuse, excuse, she needed an excuse. No,  _the daughter of the devil is in my living room_  was  _not_ an acceptable excuse, however true it might be. "My cousin just showed up. I wasn't expecting her – until tomorrow," she quickly added. Cousins didn't show up unannounced. If it was her roommate's cousin, then maybe, but then she wouldn't need to bail on the meeting.

 A quick round of goodbyes and she ended the chat on her end and hurried out to greet the source of the interesting times they lived in.

 "You look like shit." Emma clamped a hand over her mouth but it was too late. The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. Kyria – no, dammit, she was _Dawn_ these days – and her friend  _did_ kind of look like shit, though, smudged with ash and big dark circles like neither one had slept in days. And that wasn't counting the haunted look in the guy's eyes or the way the focused look in Dawn's warned of _DANGER_.

 Jo laughed. "That's exactly what I told 'em when I opened the door."

 Emma dropped her hand, face still flushed with embarrassment. Then she frowned. "Is your hand metal?" she asked in disbelief.

 The guy just stared at her blankly while Dawn grimaced. "It's a long story," the Morningstar said, "and I'm not entirely sure I want to get into it right now. But we need a place to stay – I used the Alexandria house a few days ago, and all the rest are traceable to SHIELD."

 "That's a bad thing?" Jo asked, all traces of mirth gone.

 Dawn sighed. "Suffice to say that SHIELD isn't trustworthy at the moment.”

 Emma stopped breathing. SHIELD was the organization behind the Morningstar, the mundane authority behind NINJAT. One way or another, the tribe was _part_ of NINJAT, which made them, peripherally, part of SHIELD. If there was a problem with SHIELD . . .

 “I don't know if Zola get a message out before blowing himself up,” Dawn continued, “I don't know if SHIELD thinks Morrow's a threat, or even if they know we survived the damn missile."

 "Missile?" Jo repeated sharply. "SHIELD tried to kill you? What happened?"

 She let out another sigh, this one longer. "For now, I'm assuming HYDRA has control of SHIELD."

 "HYDRA?" Emma said in shock. "Like World War Two, the creepy Nazi sub-division that your Ultimate Frisbee friend defeated?" She may only have been alive for a year, but Captain America was one of Orion's teammates and Orion was Morningstar was changing the way the tribe operated. She did her research.

 And her research was strongly suggesting Nazis were threatening her family nearly seven decades after they lost the war.

 "They played the long game," Morningstar said in distaste. "SHIELD took the scientists, and they grew the heads back within SHIELD."

 "Well,  _shit,_ " Jo proclaimed with vehemence.

 "And seeing as I just told what I'm pretty sure was their version of JARVIS that Dawn Morrow was Morningstar and wasn't going to play nice, it's probably safe to say that SHIELD is going to try to bring in Morrow." She made an annoyed face. "Probably in connection with the Director's death. Ironic, that."

 "Wait, back up," Jo said, shaking her head. "Fury's  _dead?_ Since when? How'd he die?"

 The corner of her mouth turned up. "I'm not sure about the circumstances, but it wasn't an accident. And he's dead in the same way that Orion is on Asgard."

 Jo choked.

 Emma wasn't sure what she was missing. Dawn was Orion and she was right here, so she couldn't be on Asgard – oh. Faking deaths was a thing, apparently. Well, faking humanity was a thing, so why not fake deaths too? She really needed to spend (waste) less time dealing with her senseless classmates and spend more time keeping up to date with the ninja boards. Not that that would always help her because faking the Director’s death must have been very recent or more classified than most ninja things because Darcy hadn’t said a word about it. Having declared herself the Ambassador of Pop Culture, Darcy liked to keep the ninja network up to date with the world.

 But Jo hadn’t even known the Director was dead, and she was always talking with the two computer programmers who coordinated the entire ninja network, so there probably wasn’t anything Emma could have done to have forewarning. Not that that made her feel better. It wasn’t enough to just be a young Amazon in college, she had to follow the changing tides of the ninjas as well.

 Sometimes she really hated being the face of the future of the Amazonian tribe.

 The tribe was changing because the rest of the world was changing and sometimes it was hard to keep up with the changes. Like, say, when someone tried to assassinate the Director of SHIELD and he faked his death to get out of it because SHIELD apparently had a few bad apples intent on rotting the entire barrel.

 "Are you gonna introduce us or what?" Jo asked, shaking Emma out of her thoughts. "If we're putting you up, we should at least know  _who_ SHIELD is gonna come after.

 Dawn raised an eyebrow. "I wouldn't have come if I thought SHIELD could track me here."

 Jo flashed a wide grin. "Scared of Mama Bear Harvelle?"

 Dawn smiled in amusement. "I wouldn't say  _scared,_ just – justifiably wary. Ellen called up Andy to give his ward a piece of her mind. Something about reckless endangerment and suicidal stupidity and guilt-stalking."

 Jo's grin got wider. "Well, Mom's got an empty nest and you gave her a broken fledgling. She all but adopted Hannah."

 "Glad to hear it," Dawn replied fondly. "So, girls, this is James Barnes. I rescued-slash-stole him from HYDRA and they're none too happy about that. James, meet Jo Harvelle and Emma Winchester."

 Emma thought about it briefly. Stranger things had happened, and HYDRA was back from the pages of history, so it might be possible. She asked, "James  _Buchanan_ Barnes?"

 Dawn's grin was lopsided. "The one and only. Although, his head is still kinda scrambled. HYDRA decided brain-washing was a thing. Zola activating a back door in the programming probably didn't help."

 "Not cool," Jo replied fiercely. "Bucky Barnes was – is, I guess, since you're him and not dead in the Alps – a national hero. HYDRA doesn't get to fuck with your head. But it's late and you look like shit and we left the third bedroom for guests. If you don't mind sharing?" she added.

 Dawn looked at James – and  _holy shit, Bucky Barnes was in her apartment._  The awe took the edge off of her homicidal warrior instincts. How did Jo manage to be so calm and collected in the face of this? More experience? She thought about the kind of experience it would take for paradigm altering threats to be taken lightly and realized, one, that wasn’t the kind of experience she wanted to have, and two, that was the kind of experience the Morningstar . . .  generated or attracted, she wasn’t sure which.

 Eventually he realized Dawn wanted him to answer and shrugged. "'s fine," he mumbled.

 "Sharing a room is fine," Dawn said with a sigh.

 Emma looked between the two before realization hit. Okay, so getting the not-dead, brain-washed national hero to talk was being put on the agenda. Talking might help unscramble his head. Or just keep it from re-scrambling.

 Watching the pair follow Jo to the bathroom and guest room, Emma noticed the way Barnes – James? Bucky? What was she supposed to call him? – moved. There was shock and uncertainty in his movements, but beneath that was a predator. Getting the soldier comfortable in his own head rapidly gained priority. Young she may be, but no Amazon allowed unchecked threats access to her person. Dawn was the first check, but Emma would keep an eye out. Dangerous man out of time  _and_  an evil Nazi organization.

 Yep. The Morningstar kept them all living in interesting times.

 


	7. Chapter 7

A blond head appeared in his field of view, its edges blurred. He recognized the head, and didn't at the same time. Something about it was different, besides the fact that he  _knew_  it wasn't supposed to be here. But it was, and the hands attached to it were loosening his bonds and half-carrying him away.

 “. . . too dumb not to run away from a fight," a familiar voice said. He turned to locate the speaker and when he looked back, the blond head had put on a blue helmet and moved further away. He saw it through the scope of a rifle.

 Something red moved in the background before he could squeeze the trigger and the whole building blew up.

  _Fire –_

 And then it was gone, replaced by a train speeding through snow-covered mountains. He was on the train, and then he was outside the train and the blond head was back, screaming a name, but the wind screamed voices in his ears and the world was dizzily spinning as it got closer.

 "Don't win the war 'til I get there." 

“– inadequate records of that time.”                     

                            “. . . died in 1944?” 

“These are the times that try men’s souls.” 

"3 – 2 – 5 – 5 – 7 –”         

 The snow wasn't as cold as it looked. He could barely feel it. And someone was there, dragging him away, leaving a trail of red to follow back. 

                                           “I have a mission for you.” 

“Not without you!” 

“. . . in the depth of winter . . .” 

“I joined the army.”                       

 An arm drawn in light hung over the table. A human arm, rather than the two mechanized arms that bracketed his Chair. The drawn lines stretched and extended into a torso with a second arm. Legs grew, then a head. A rubber guard was pushed into his mouth and he bit down as the equipment was lowered around his head and he couldn’t move as a man with his face stepped off of the table and pointed a gun at him.

 "Sergeant Barnes . . .” 

"Hey, Sarge!"                     

                           “– Terminator." 

"Bucky –”

“. . . the new fist of HYDRA."                       

“– more than the sum of your parts.” 

"Shoot her." 

A man stood on a catwalk and took off his face. The skin beneath was blood red and hairless. It looked like a demon out of the Sunday sermons. At his feet, a woman with dark hair lay bleeding out, fingers stained red from the hole in her stomach. The demon holstered his gun and laughed. 

                  “– no witnesses.” 

“– into the jaws of death?"                                    

“You don’t have one of those do you?”                                 

"He may only have been lost."

 He was locked in a tiny room and the only window was covered in ice. The dark haired woman was sprawled on the floor outside the window in a pool of red but he couldn’t get to her through the cold in his bones.

                     "There are men laying down their lives –"

 “3 – 2 –5 –“ 

“. . . came forth to meet and repulse it.”

 "Wipe him and start over."                                                                    

"Hang on! Grab my hand!"

 But someone was leaning over his hand, working on it, and when he lifted his hands, one gleamed silver. The other dripped red. He frowned at it in confusion and a faceless shadow slipped a gun into his grip. He turned and fired and the woman fell and the wall exploded into fire and the red demon just stood there and laughed beside a pudgy rat-faced man in glasses who smiled in a way that raised the hair on the back of his neck. 

"Wake up!"

                                "Put him on ice."

 No!

 He surged forward to stop the rat-faced man, or the demon, whichever he could reach, but they spun out of his reach and he crashed into the wall instead. 

"James!" 

“. . . not easily conquered.” 

"Welcome home, my Soldier." 

               "He's not your soldier anymore." 

"I had him on the ropes."                                            

 He roughly shoved off the wall, trying to catch the demon before ice returned. Frosted blue chased blood red across his vision. Something living moved at the edge and he tackled it to the floor as the ceiling burned. 

“. . . one common danger . . .” 

"Cut off one head, two more shall take its place."             

"I'm turning into you. It's like a horrible dream." 

The body beneath him gushed red before twisting him into the snow. A cold numbness immediately seeped into his bones, ice creeping in to cloud his vision. Weapons were supposed to be returned to storage – he was stored in ice. But he wasn't a weapon anymore, he refused. There was a man with his face and he had to find him. 

                                                 "Wipe him and start over."         

“. . . shrink from the service of their country . . .” 

"Snap out of it!"

 He bucked against the cold weight, but the demon slammed him down and laughed. The doors slammed shut, trapping him in with the monster.

 "Accidents will happen." 

“Don’t let anyone take that away.” 

                                                            "The procedure is already started." 

He bucked again, twisting his body and lashing out with the metal abomination drilled into his body. The black haired woman fell at the demon's feet and there was so much red he was drowning in it, heads exploding down the barrel of a gun. 

"Shoot her."                                                       

"There's got to be a rope or something." 

"Grab my hand!" 

He staggered back, trying to get away, but the girder lost its grip and plunged into the flames, and he fell with it and he was so cold and the ground beneath the cold gave way to swallow him up into something colder and his arm ached and he couldn’t breathe. 

"Bucky!" 

"My greatest creation." 

"Sometimes I think you like getting punched." 

The weapon was not functioning properly, so they strapped him down in order to fix it. Fix him. Turn him back into a weapon. 

"This isn't payback, is it?"                                             

                     "Sergeant Barnes." 

"James!"

 He couldn't resist when they slipped a guard between his teeth and flicked the switch. His vision turned white and his muscles seized and he would scream if only he could unlock his jaw. 

"Wake  _up_ , James!"

 He shuddered, the whiteness fading, leaving shaking limbs in its place. He was on his back on the floor of a darkened room, the black haired woman pinning him to the floor. 

"Dawn?"

 "Oh thank Grandfather," she exclaimed, slackening her grip.

 "What happened?" He couldn't remember anything past laying down on the bed. Had HYDRA triggered the Winter Soldier again? But why couldn't he remember?

 "You had a nightmare."

 He blinked. "Not HYDRA?"

 "Not exactly," she replied, eyes dark, face grim. "What they did to you is the sort to leave scars."

 His right hand went involuntarily to cover the opposite shoulder. Dawn covered the hand with one of her own. "Not just those. They stole your will and your mind, forced you to do terrible things that you never would have done freely. They hurt you when you tried to fight back. I've come across things like this before, but never to this extent. HYDRA – essentially they raped you."

 He flinched away from the word. He wasn't a  _victim_  – he was a soldier, an assassin. He  _killed_  people.

 "You never had a choice."

 He didn't know if he had spoken aloud or if she read the thoughts on his face.

 "You're not the one at fault, James," she continued. "If anything, you tried to fight them so much, they had to completely overwrite your entire personality. They  _unmade_  you."

 "I hate them." He didn't mean to say it, but once the words fell from his lips, he found he couldn't disagree. 

 The bitterness of her smile said she understood. "I know."

 With that, she moved off of him and offered him a hand up. She was left-handed. He had noticed but not thought about it before. Now he stared at the proffered hand in silence. She looked at her hand, then at his, and met his eyes with a challenge. He put his left hand in hers and she pulled him to his feet.

 There was a muffled knock on the door. "Everything okay in there?" It sounded like the older of the two women who lived here. The younger was out there as well

 "Just a nightmare," Dawn called back. "We're fine now, Jo. Tell Emma she can stand down as well."

 "Will do," came the response, followed by faint conversation and the sound of the two walking away.

 They lay back on the bed in silence.

 He couldn't go back to sleep and judging by her breathing, she was not asleep either. There were so many things he felt like he wanted or should say, but nothing came out. He didn't know if she trusted him not to hurt her friends, her friends to defend themselves, or herself to stop him before it became an issue. Whichever the case, it felt . . . loose, though whether that was good or bad he didn't know.

 "I shot you."

 She didn't move, either away or to restrain him again. "You did," she agreed quietly.

 "You lied when you said you were wearing armor. I saw the blood." He held himself very still because he didn't know if he was asking why she lied or how she survived. Asking things was . . . difficult. In his head he knew that was a result of what they did to him, but it didn't make questions come any easier.

 "Yes. It's not the first time I was shot. It’s –" She broke off and sighed. "Did you read that Orion is an alien?"

 He wasn't entirely sure what bearing that had on the original question, but, "Yes."

 "There's a bit more to it than that."

 In the darkened room, without neither one facing the other, she told him a story about angels and demons and family and aliens and superheroes. It wasn’t what he’d been taught about angels and demons – but when he tried to remember what he’d been taught it skittered out of reach.

 “I am the reason the people I cared about most are dead.”

 The words lingered heavy in the darkness.

 “My mother was killed by demons looking for me. My partner was killed by demons trying to kill me. And I know that both would have died even without me, but . . . that doesn’t shake the fact that they are dead because of _me_.”

 It wasn’t the same. He knew it wasn’t the same. But the guilt – yes, the guilt was the same. If the Winter Soldier hadn’t been the weapon chosen for the list of the dead he could almost remember, something, some _one_ else would have been used to kill them. But that didn’t change that it _had been_ him. The Winter Soldier wasn’t so different from the Army sergeant in the end. Neither volunteered, although both followed orders to kill, and both, in their own way, believed in their work.

 It only hurt so much because the Winter Soldier’s orders came from the people the Army sergeant had fought _against._ The people he had – almost – died trying to defeat. He wished he _had_ died. Died instead of becoming this broken thing constructed of pieces of other people.

 “Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life,” Dawn replied with the faintest hint of amusement. Then she sighed. “A friend of mine describes it as having red in her ledger. It’s surprisingly common in my line of work. And even the ones without red in their ledgers have red on their hands.”

 It was almost . . . reassuring to know that he wasn’t alone in this, even if he wasn’t like most of the people Dawn collected.

 “Your outlook on life changes when you’re not quite human,” she explained wryly. “But, yeah. Your situation sounds more like demonic meatsuits. Huh. Maybe when we get this sorted, I’ll introduce you to my uncle. I wouldn’t recommend Gabriel to anyone with your current erratic hair-trigger, but his protégé has some experience with mind control. They may be able to help.”

 He shot her and she still wanted to help him. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

 The devil was real. Satan existed and his daughter was eternally atoning for her father’s sins. It all sounded so unbelievable, but so did miracle serums and fully functioning metal arms and walking away from a bullet to the stomach and not remembering his own life and taking shelter beneath electric wings as the building came down around them.

 Dawn was light and goodness. If hope and virtue survived the winter, it was because she willed it so.

 She broke herself down to base components and built herself up into two people, possibly more, to protect the secrets of herself and others. And because she had done that, HYDRA didn’t know her. Computer-Zola had identified her as “Morrow, Dawn, born 1984” but that woman was a construct, it wasn’t _her_. She was Dawn Morrow and Kyria Lux and Orion and Morningstar and not a single one of those was all that she was. 

_(You are more than the sum of your parts_.)

 It explained why she was so understanding of him. It explained why the Winter Soldier voice in his head was so certain she was dangerous. It also explained why he felt so – comfortable – around her. She was multiple people too, if mainly by choice.

 All of her pieces were there to protect. Maybe different types of protection, but that’s what all of her faces did. And because she was all of them, she could take down any of _him_. As she had demonstrated. Twice.

 That was good.

 He didn’t want to hurt anyone anymore.

 He remembered her bleeding on the floor, face lined with pain that he put there. Even then she had been able to disable him. But next time it might not be her he hurt. It could be the two young women who said he looked like hell, the elder identifying him as a soldier, the younger recognizing him as a predator. It could be – had almost been – Stark – Stark, whose parents were dead because of the Winter Soldier – 

_(used a sniper to crash a car? Just how desperate_ were _you?)_

– or the blond man – _Steven G. Rogers, called Captain America_ – he knew he was supposed to know – 

( _thought you were smaller)_

 – or even some random person he passed on the street who knew nothing about demons or HYDRA.

 ( _accidents will happen)_  

 He didn't want that to happen. He didn't want to hurt someone because he couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t control his own actions. He didn’t want to not _remember_ who he was or what he was doing. 

( _They_ unmade _you.)_

 Dawn could prevent that. She was dangerous, yes, but it was the good kind. She brought light and hope and memory into the depth of winter. She was his star of the morning, the dawn after a very dark night. She wanted to help him. She treated him like a person. She called him friend.

 He didn't know what to do with a friend. Maybe she could tell him.

 Even if she couldn't, he didn't think he'd mind being her weapon. The Winter Soldier agreed.

 ***

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That was dark and class starts tomorrow so have another.

Dawn didn’t bother trying to go back to sleep. Instead, she waited until Jo and Emma woke at a more reasonable hour to assign them to watch Barnes. Then she closed herself in her room and called herself nine kinds of idiot in a wide range of languages and blamed the brain melt on stress and lack of sleep.

 "Charlie, Ash, hi, get on the horn and send a generalized alert to everyone in the system. Until further notice, do not trust SHIELD."

 "What?! I mean, done, that was incredibly simple, probably the simplest ninja thing I've ever done, but what's happening with SHIELD? Did you find who was blocking our hacks? Was it SHIELD?"

 Dawn grimaced, adding Stark in on the conference call. It was harder to encrypt complicated conference calls, but JARVIS picked up the New York end and handled the work on that side.

 "Okay, so, legendary good news and bad news. Good news is I found the signal and, well, let's just say it won't be a problem anymore. Bad news, the signal was just a symptom of the problem, namely HYDRA's not as dead history as would lead us to believe."

 "Wow, you've just got the entire subplot of World War Two going on, don't you?"

 "Worse news," she continued, deliberately ignoring Stark's inevitable commentary, "HYDRA is in SHIELD."

 Utter silence on the three open sides of the conference. Dawn could hear whoever lived upstairs to the girls shuffling around like a drunken elephant.

 Predictably, Stark recovered his faculties first. "I stand by my ongoing contempt of intelligence agencies that fear intelligence," he proclaimed. "But by 'in SHIELD' you mean –”

 "A short-range ballistic missile was fired – by SHIELD – at a certain New Jersey locale late yesterday evening while I was inspecting the premises."

 "JARVIS didn't tell me anything about a missile launch –”

 "I did not know of it, Sir," the computerized sentience interjected, sounding as shaken as a synthesized voice could.

 "Because the rot goes high enough to cover its tracks," Dawn all but spat. Millennia of avoiding demons, and she ended up working for Nazis. She was  _pissed._  "It's a fair bet that they're the ones who had Fury killed."

 On the divided screen, Charlie's miniature face frowned. "But I thought –”

 Ash cut her off. "Encrypted call or not, don't say anything on the wire you wouldn't want The Man to hear."

 "The Morningstar takes poorly to attempted hits. She's coming for HYDRA."

 There was a beat, and then Stark grinned. "Bold-faced challenges. Gotta love those."

 "As long as they don't end with houses falling into the sea and the entire free world, friends included, thinking you're dead," Dawn retorted. "And yes, I did issue the challenge to their face. Whether or not the message was sent before the missile hit remains to be seen but I'm not averse to re-issuing it." 

 "They can't  _all_  be HYDRA," Charlie protested.

 "Probably not," Ash agreed thoughtfully. "But if we haven't noticed it before now, it would take a seriously fine-toothed comb to spot who's who."

 "Hill's probably clean," Dawn admitted, hoping she was right. "She's the one who alerted me about Fury." She didn't think HYDRA would arrange to fake the Director's death – unless they captured him. But Fury was too much of an over-prepared, ornery bastard to let himself be taken and if  _he_  was HYDRA, Kyria was denouncing the entire planet and becoming an Asgardian monk. Actually, they were practically gods, they probably didn’t have monks. A Jotun hermit then.

 As much as he could occasionally be a high-handed bastard, none of them believed Fury could be HYDRA. And if he wasn't HYDRA, Hill couldn't be either.

 The discussion on how to determine who was SHIELD and who was HYDRA was nowhere near as simple and Jo knocked on the door midway through to drop off a bowl of tuna salad. Dawn ate it absently, more intent on poking holes in Tony's arguments before he decided to put on the suit and blast his way through the Triskelion.

 There was no way, even for JARVIS or Morningstar, to hack into SHIELD and take control of the Insight Helicarriers before they launched. Tony berated himself for helping SHIELD hack-proof any and all Helicarriers, but those things would be  _catastrophic_  if they fell into the wrong hands.

 As much as Tony (and a lot of the ninjas) distrusted government agencies on principle, no one had seriously entertained the notion of SHIELD going George Orwell on the world.

 Hacking was out. That left preventing the launch in general and on-site reprogramming.

 "You said no blasting, so who can we trust inside Big Brother?"

 Hill would be under too much scrutiny for them to attempt contact. Bela was at the Hub, and even if she could get to DC in time, likely wouldn’t be able to get at the ‘carriers. Orion could make a timely return from Asgard, but she would be under too much scrutiny to get close.

 "Steve should be back state-side," Dawn suggested.

 "Huh, good choice," Tony agreed, pulling up files on what was presumably Steve's last mission. "If Captain America joined HYDRA, I'm a monkey's uncle. Girl Assassin was with him. We want to bring her in too?"

 Red Room training or not, Dawn considered Natasha as close to family as her (extremely fucked up) heritage allowed.

 "I know she didn't give you the best first impression, Tony, but I trust Nat with my life." Literally. Nat had one of the three weapons guaranteed to kill her.

 "Oh, so I'm Tony again? Nevermind. Fine. You're vouching for the Russian Mata Hari to go with your Tin Soldier. Ah, slight problem. I think Spangles and Spy-sassin are in the wind."

 Their phones were off. Of course their phones were off. Natasha knew the first step in disappearing was to ditch any registered, traceable electronic device. Which was pretty much all of them. But if Natasha wanted to disappear, then the HYDRA problem was making itself known to others, which meant they weren't as concerned about secrecy, which meant they were close enough to realizing their plan of world domination that they didn't think stepping out of the shadows would prevent anyone from stopping them.

 Which was really, really, bad because Nazis weren't allowed to take over the world.

 "Besides, Nazis went out of fashion in Nuremburg. They should all be dead by now. There is no way I'm letting a bunch of dead guys take over the world. Way too  _Dawn of the Dead."_

 "Zombies can't take over the world," Charlie exclaimed in horror. "I mean, I would totally kick ass if they did, I totally rocked  _Red Scare_. But electricity is one of the first things to go when social order collapses. I need my computer. Or my tablet. Or my phone. I'm not picky."

 "Two words," Tony replied, "Arc. Reactor."

 "But what if the zombies get you?" the hacker pointed out. "They get you, they get your tower, and your tech, and you  _know_  they won't be able to appreciate it."

 "Did you just imply that Iron Man could be taken down by something as mediocre as  _zombies?"_  Tony asked in disbelief. "I have no words for how offended I am that you think so little of me. Your invitation to my Tower fortress for the zombie apocalypse is hereby rescinded."

 Rolling her eyes, Dawn tuned them out. At least if HYDRA tapped the conversation, they wouldn't be worried by the opposition. But that didn't mean the opposition wasn't worried about HYDRA. They just had – odd – ways of expressing that concern. Dean wasn't the only one for whom "snark" was the default worry setting. And none of this was doing a damn thing towards finding where Nat and Steve were hiding. Hopefully they were together, because that would be easier all around. But  _because_  it was easier, it wasn't guaranteed. Life kind of sucked that way.

 Actually, she might be able to find Nat. She had a connection to her angel swords, after all. Proximity worked best, but if she could hear Phil’s heartbeat, she could find Natasha.

Theoretically.

 Closing her eyes, she reached out for the blades she had out in the world. There were a few of them, but she could _feel_ them – and by extension the person with the power to wield them. _That_ one belonged to a red-headed Russian assassin. And although the blade was only peripherally hers anymore, she could still reach it. Small miracles. She _pulled_  on the familiar feel of the blade in a pattern of longs and shorts.

 Her phone buzzed call waiting from an unrecognized number.

 "Who wants to talk to you and do we trust them?" Tony demanded.

 "I'm almost positive this is Nat," she replied. "If it is, I'll conference her in."

 It was Nat. "Assuming my emergency weapon didn’t just have a very specific malfunction, please tell me you weren’t going to follow ‘call me’ with ‘maybe.’"

 She laughed. "Who do you take me for? Gabriel? Hang on." There were an awful lot of people in this phone call by now. "We're in conference mode."

 "Who's there?" the spy asked suspiciously.

 "Ash, Charlie, and Tony. I'm rather hoping you know where Steve is because I don't fancy trying to spring him from SHIELD given the circumstances."

 "I'm here," the not-so-missing man spoke up on Natasha's end. Okay, so maybe some things were just that easy. Not many, but some. Murphy couldn’t win them all. (Thankfully.)

 "You know about the problem with SHIELD?" Nat asked.

 "Know?" Dawn repeated. "They fired a fucking missile at me. If I was just about anyone else, I'd be dead and wouldn't be able to tell you that HYDRA's had a foothold in SHIELD since the beginning."

 "HYDRA?" Steve – or perhaps Captain America – repeated in mingled horror and rage.

 Dawn gave an abbreviated accounting of the events of the past view days, with one notable exception. Tony picked up on it immediately and gave her a look. She shook her head back, grateful that whatever phone Nat was using didn't have video calling.

 "One question I have is what Fury was doing that pushed HYDRA into eliminating him ahead of schedule," she said in conclusion.

 "He was investigating a possible problem with the Insight ‘carriers," Steve answered, having regained some of his equilibrium after the shocking revelations.

 "More like an  _actual_  problem," Tony noted, "but go on."

 Their half of the pieces involved Fury hiring pirates to attack his own ship so he would have an excuse to send Nat and Steve in to recapture it as a cover to try to figure out what the fuck was going on, a supposedly peaceful, threat-annihilating Helicarrier project about to launch, a World Security Council member taking Fury's apparent betrayal and death very personally, and a mysteriously appearing flash drive with a signal that came from New Jersey.

 "That's a dead end," Dawn said. "We tracked the same signal and it went down under that missile strike. Nothing left but a crater."

 "You keep saying 'we'," Natasha said. "Who went to Jersey with you?"

 She grimaced, aware that Nat couldn't see her expression. "It's kind of complicated," she hedged.

 "Uncomplicate it."

 "I may have liberated a prisoner from the HYDRA base War was lurking outside of."

 She could practically hear Nat's frown. "They were keeping prisoners? Why?"

 "Um. Well. You can't be a proper evil villain unless you experiment with mind control and/or brain-washing techniques."

 "Dawn," Nat said flatly in warning.

 "He's sort of the reason you don't wear bikinis." She made a threatening gesture before Stark could do more than open his mouth.

 "Dawn," Nat repeated, considerably more agitated. "Please tell me you didn't take in the  _Winter Soldier_  like he was a stray cat."

 "I'd call him more of a kicked puppy."

 "Dawn! Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe he exists. He is credited with over two dozen assassinations in the last fifty years!"

 "Most of the intelligence community doesn't believe the Morningstar exists either," she snapped. "We can be twice the ghost story together. Besides, it wasn't like he had a choice. He didn't remember his own fucking  _name_  when I got him out of there. I'm still not convinced he remembers who he was before they turned him into a mindless weapon, put a gun in his hand, and aimed him at the targets of their choice."

 "I really hope you know what you're doing."

 "So do I," she agreed.

 "Not that I mind tangents, but, um, what are we doing about HYDRA?" Charlie asked timidly.

 Hashing out details, it was decided that Tony and the Tech Twins, which sounded like a bad garage band, would hack into HYDRA as far as they could, while Nat, Steve, and Steve's friend, who was unnamed but sheltering them, would kidnap a suspected HYDRA agent, and Dawn mobilized a force (read: ninjas) to attack SHIELDRA (Tony wasn't any better at naming things than SHIELD, see his bots for further details) and met up with Steve and company with the Winter Soldier.

 She didn't want to be Jasper when Phil found out he was a traitor. That was not going to be pretty.

 Nor would be Steve's reaction when he learned who the Winter Soldier was beneath seventy years of HYDRA conditioning.

 ***

 In never actually occurred to Dawn just how long the entire multi-faceted, multi-person discussion lasted until it ended and she realized how stiff she was from sitting. Only then did she look at the time and grimace. As engaged as she had been in the phone conference, she would still have heard gunshots and/or screaming behind the closed door. So clearly the world had not exploded in blood and disaster while she was cloistered away.

 She poked her head out the door cautiously anyway. Nope, no screaming, crying, bullets, or blood. Just the normal sounds of conversation – and did she smell  _nail polish?_

 Dawn followed the murmur of voices to the kitchen where Jo leaned against the counter holding a white Chinese food container, but not eating it, too busy failing to conceal a grin while watching James enthusiastically eat his way through a pint of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough as Emma sat in the chair beside him, talking about herself.

 "– abrupt end to that. So I’m the only one in my age-group with a living father. I’m _different._ The _entire_ tribe is watching to see if I can succeed or not and I do not know if the matrons have decided what to do for next year’s fertility cycle yet. People always talk about how college is a time to try new things and plan for your future, but it’s not just my future hanging over me. No pressure or anything, right?"

 The crowning touch that had Dawn suspecting hallucinogens was the part where Emma was applying nail polish to the Winter Soldier's arm.

 Dawn snapped a picture on her phone, half convinced she was imagining things.

 James looked up at the unfamiliar noise and squared his shoulders – much to Emma's annoyance if her frown and briefly narrowed eyes were anything to go by – when Dawn smirked and raised an eyebrow at him. "I will not be their Weapon anymore," he said with more than a hint of defiance.

 Her smirk eased into something gentler. "Nothing wrong with that," she said. "You suggest the design or did the girls?" she added, taking in the concentric circles around the formerly red star adorning the metallic shoulder.

 He searched for words, but none came out, much to his frustration. Emma came to his rescue. "He wanted the design changed, but didn't know what to do instead. I showed him a picture of Cap's iconic shield, and he liked it. I thought he would," the Amazon added proudly.

 "Looks good," Dawn said, praising both the young girl desperately trying to find her place in the world and the damaged soldier seeking the same. "When this is all over, Tony can probably come up with something a little more permanent than nail polish. That is, if he doesn't make you a whole new arm. He does stuff like that."

 James looked down at his hand, clenching it into a metal fist. "I don't know."

 "That's okay," she replied gently. "You have time to decide what you want to do."

 "After we stop HYDRA."

 "You don't have to participate," she said, not because she thought he would stay out of it, but to make it clear that he had a  _choice_  in the matter.

 He frowned at her. "You gonna try and stop me?"

 "Nope. Just making sure you're doing it because you want to and not because I said you should."

 "They took everything from me. This is my red," he said darkly, face settled in an odd place between blank and coldly furious that would make any normal person run away in blind terror.

 Not a single one of the people in the kitchen was in any way normal.

 Dawn grinned back with her own predatory expression. "We make a nice pair of vengeful ghosts."

 "And I don't even need to do a salt-and-burn," Jo replied cheekily.

 Dawn snorted. "Your mother might. Your father, too," she added to Emma.

 "Why?" the Amazon asked warily.

 "Because we need an army if we're going to wage a war on SHIELD. Know anyone who might be interested?"

 The girls looked at each other briefly before turning back to her and simultaneously chorusing, "I'm in."

 ***


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Clearly I wanted today to be Thursday. Unfortunately for me, it's not. Fortunately for you lovely people, I posted this before I woke up enough to realize that.

Terry really didn’t know why she put up with her daughter’s abysmal taste in music. It was one thing to know her teenaged daughter listened to horrible screeching and swearing at volumes that would leave her with impaired hearing by the time Maggie was  _her_  age, but it was quite another to have to listen to the stuff when driving the girl around. Radio wars tended to result in worse music, played  _louder_ , so that was a tactic she wouldn't be using again.

 Maggie was clearly unconcerned, playing with the iPhone she’d gotten for Christmas. Maybe next year they should try getting her less offensive music? Yes, and then Maggie would complain that CD's were outdated and return them  _anyway._  They would find a compromise. Eventually. Hopefully before Maggie went to college and it became a non-issue.

 But if the music wasn’t enough to drive Terry to distraction, the traffic certainly was. No one seemed to know how to drive these days and motorcycles were among the worst. The motorcycle approaching in her rear-view window, blissfully white-lining away only proved her point. For D.C. in the middle of the afternoon, the highway wasn’t even that congested! There was no need to drive between the lanes!

 Unless, of course, the fifty-five mile-per-hour traffic wasn’t fast enough for the poor little speed demon. In Terry’s opinion, anyone who wanted to go flying down the road was crazy, and to do so on a motorcycle with nothing between you and whatever hit you at ungodly speeds was utter stupidity. 

 And how considerate. The motorcyclist had settled on the line just to the left and in front of her. Pick a lane, buddy! And was that passenger not wearing a helmet? No, that was definitely loose flying hair. Great, crazy, stupid,  _and_  suicidal. If Maggie wasn’t with her, she might have a few choice phrases to share. But it was important to set a good example for her daughter. She could hardly scold Maggie for language if she used those words in her daughter’s hearing; Maggie acted out more when she felt there were double standards involved.

 Still.

Where was a cop when you needed one?

 “Look out!” Maggie cried suddenly.

 It was all Terry could do to not slam on the breaks as the motorcycle’s passenger abruptly swung around with –  _oh my God was that a_  gun?! – and fired.

 The big ugly beige Humvee behind her Jeep swerved into the middle lane as her heart jumped into her throat and it was all she could do to keep driving in a more-or-less straight line as she saw in the rear-view mirror someone shooting back from the Humvee’s passenger side window.

 “Oh God! Get down, Maggie!”

 Her daughter blatantly ignored her, choosing instead to take video on her phone while semi-crouching in her seat. And Terry was  _right_  in the path between her daughter and the crazy highway shoot-out – this was D.C.! Things like this weren't supposed to happen! Not in broad daylight anyway! – so anything and everything she said would forever be preserved on Maggie's phone.

 In between glancing incredulously at her daughter – and staring smack at the camera phone while unsuccessfully trying to convince Maggie to duck down – and trying and failing to either speed past the motorcycle or drop back past the Humvee, Terry finally noticed the motorcycle was staying even with little black Chevy in the middle lane – coincidentally directly in front of the Humvee. She was too focused on not causing the accident-waiting-to-happen that was this whole situation to worry about more than if the Chevy was going to start shooting as well.

 The back window of the Chevy shattered on cue and one of the people in the back seat opened fire on the Humvee as the other ducked down.

 Good example or not, Terry was pretty sure she started cursing when the motorcycle passenger – wearing a complete face mask could never be a good thing when involved in a gunfight on a highway – leapt from the bike to the roof of the Chevy. There didn't appear to be any bullets exchanged between the occupants of the vehicle and the masked man on the roof, but Terry didn't know if that was good or bad and didn't particularly care.

 Between the motorcycle half in front of her, the Chevy and Humvee to her left, the edge of the highway to her right, and the appalling lack of exits on this stretch of road, Terry was trapped alongside a highway shoot-out. Why did this have to happen right when she was in the middle? Why did this have to happen when her daughter wasn’t safely at home?

 Showing more sense than recording the video would indicate, Maggie screamed as a stray bullet cracked the rear driver’s side window.

 Routinely glancing over at the – military? pseudo-military? mob? drug cartel? – Humvee on her left, Terry gasped aloud. “Holy shit,” she breathed in horrified recognition. Contrarily to her daughter’s belief, she  _did_  watch television – it was how she recognized the monstrosity sticking out the side of the Humvee she was half-convinced was the cause of the shoot-out (the other half blamed the motorcycle) as some sort of RPG. Or maybe a bazooka? Something really big and dangerous and clearly not well-regulated enough. And to think people raised such a stink about gun control, which was really mostly handguns, when it was obviously the military-grade weapons that were more of a problem! Not to mention that law-abiding citizens who adhered to the ridiculous gun laws wouldn’t be the ones shooting up other vehicles on the highway!

 Terry wasn’t sure if she was more surprised when the motorcyclist pulled a trick similar to the his passenger and whipped bodily around as the RPG fired or when what looked like lightning sprang from the leather-clad driver’s – at least he was wearing a helmet – hands to explode the blast in midair.

 "Oh my God!" Maggie exclaimed beside her, sounding almost more excited than scared. What did the media  _do_  to kids these days that she wasn't terrified out of her mind like her mother? "Is that  _Orion?"_

 Terry was too busy screaming as the motorcycle swerved directly in front of her with its driver distracted to respond to her daughter's inanities. She hit the brakes and white-knuckled the wheel, screaming again as the motorcyclist slammed into her windshield, the Jeep shuddering as it plowed the motorcycle into the concrete barrier.

 The fact that she would almost certainly cause a multi-car pile-up was the only reason Terry didn’t stop in the middle of the highway with a body on her cracked windshield. Although if she stopped she wouldn’t be trapped in the middle of the shoot-out. Yes, but, that would require her to drop past the Humvee which would almost certainly shoot at the body on her windshield which would mean they would be shooting at the car _with her daughter inside_ and God, why this even happening?

 And then the tiny part of her brain that was still remotely rational about any of this finally processed Maggie's question, cluing Terry in that this was a lot bigger than a mere shoot-out.

 Unless she was very much mistaken – or dreaming, because this would make so much more sense as a nightmare, the really crazy stress kind although right now _this_ was the only thing stressing her out – not only had she hit a motorcyclist – oh, God, her insurance was going to  _skyrocket_  – she’d hit an Avenger. An _Avenger_. No one even knew who Orion  _was_  but there was going to be a body and it was going to be her fault. One of the mystery heroes of New York was dying on the hood of her Jeep and her fifteen-year-old daughter was  _recording_  it.

 If they got off the highway alive, the media would crucify her. She was a clerk! She never wanted to be famous! She certainly didn’t want to have to call her husband at work and explain to Mark that her car was getting shot up on the news with their daughter inside!

 Her roof rumbled and she jerked the wheel automatically in fear.

 Okay, so the motorcyclist – Avenger, celebrity,  _superhero_  – wasn’t dead, having made a grab for the antenna to stay on the hood as the car swerved alarmingly close to the edge of the roadway. Thank God for small favors.

 As Terry’s driving straightened, the motorcyclist removed the slightly battered helmet, revealing that no, it wasn’t a guy on the hood of her car, it was a black-haired woman. She was nearly positive Maggie's camera was capturing the first clear video of Orion. Which meant Maggie was almost certainly posting it on the internet. Which meant everyone was going to see her losing her mind and hitting a superhero with a car. Oh, God, her life was never going to be normal again!

 A voice from above called, “Zarya?” and Terry nearly screamed again as she realized the masked guy in black who’d been shooting at the Humvee from the roof of the Chevy was now on the roof of  _her_  car instead.

 The woman, Zarya, presumably Orion, rolled over, presumably to look up at the guy on the roof. “I’ll be fine. This is nothing. I got shot yesterday, remember?”

 Yes, Maggie was still recording. No, she hadn’t just killed an Avenger. Even if Orion had been driving recklessly, in the middle of a shoot-out on the highway in the middle of the afternoon, for reasons unknown, killing an Avenger with a car would not go over well, even if it was an accident.

 If roof-guy had a reply, Terry didn’t hear it. What she did hear was him taking a running leap off her roof to land on a second Humvee. Wait, second? Another one had shown up while she was committing vehicular assault?

 It was only slightly reassuring that she wasn’t the only one to drive erratically when someone landed on the roof of her car. Only slightly reassuring, because she could hear the occupants of the Humvee shooting at the masked man.

 And screaming. She could hear screaming. Although that might just be her.

 A shout from her new hood ornament alerted her to the fact that the men in the Humvee weren’t shooting only at the masked man. Somehow, they had also managed to take out one of the Chevy’s tires – the rear passenger one – and the drag was sending said car straight in her path. She screamed in sync with her daughter and slammed the brakes.

 The seatbelt slammed her back into her seat right before the silver Toyota – she had always hated Toyotas and this was just justifying her (slightly irrational) hatred– slammed into the back of her car and the airbags exploded in her face.

 “Maggie!”

 “I’m alright, Mom,” her daughter replied, sounding dazed and –  _still recording?_  Did the teenage generation have their electronics surgically attached to their hands or something?

 Having rolled off the hood of the abruptly braking Jeep, Orion – because it had to be Orion, who else threw lightning? Discounting Thor and his hammer, anyway – seemed alright as well, picking herself to her feet. As much as Terry wanted to argue that that was impossible, she was too grateful she hadn’t killed the woman.

 As Terry tried to calm her jack-rabbiting heartbeat, Orion met up with the occupants of the Chevy – 

 “Is that Captain America?” she blurted in disbelief. It was a blonde man of roughly the right build, holding the signature shield, so probably.

 “Does that mean the red-head is Black Widow, then?” Maggie returned.

 Terry didn’t get a chance to reply as the two Humvees disgorged armed men in black – assault gear, not suits – who proceeded to open fire as Orion and the others ducked down beside their Chevy, the red-headed woman firing back.

 With no little disbelief, Terry watched the black driver throw on a backpack, grab the bald man, and jump off the overpass using what looked like rocket-powered wings.  _Wings._  Running  _over_  the damaged Chevy, the masked man in black joined the three possible-Avengers and then he and maybe-Captain America leapt unassisted over the side of the overpass, while Orion suddenly flexed wings of her own – black feathered ones that seemed to unfold from her back – grabbed the red-haired woman and followed.

 The Humvee guys ran to the edge and fired down at them, before rappelling over the side.

 “Margaret Rose!” Terry yelled frantically as her daughter slipped out of her grasp. “Get back here!”

 The girl didn’t listen, exiting the car and creeping over to the concrete barrier to continue watching the action underneath. Running after her daughter, it occurred to Terry that a (tiny) part of her was glad Maggie had recorded the entire gunfight.

 Mark was never going to believe any of this without photographic evidence.

 ***


	10. Chapter 10

"Scatter?" Dawn asked as soon as they all touched down.

 “Make them divide their forces," Nat agreed.

 “We can’t let them get him,” Steve said with a glance at their involuntary witness.

 “We can’t let them kill us!” Steve’s mechanically winged friend objected. Dawn thought he’d fit in just fine with that sort of attitude.

 “I’ll take him,” Dawn offered.

 Gunfire apparently decided Steve, so Dawn tapped James on the shoulder, grabbed Sitwell by the arm, and led both men away from the scene as fast as she could make the captive double agent run.

 Pausing to let the wheezing traitor breathe in the shelter of a building several blocks away, Dawn abruptly pulled an angel blade out of thin air and crafted a pair of handcuffs for the second time in her life. Both times within the past year. Her life was becoming increasingly complicated. Exhibit A: evading SHIELD goons while preparing an attack on HQ. Sure, Rumlow and STRIKE had always been vaguely goon-ish, but pre-SHIELDRA (damn you, Stark), she would never have actually considered him a  _goon_. Goons were bad guys and SHIELD wasn't. Didn't used to be. Shouldn't be? Yep, complicated. Fuck her life.

 "What the hell?" Sitwell – HYDRA traitors didn't get first names, especially when it was personal – exclaimed, staring at the handcuffs that literally hadn't existed five minutes earlier.

 "I've been experimenting. Useful things, those. Short of cutting off your hands, I'm the only one who can remove that," she replied in a tone that implied she didn't actually care if someone cut his hands off. She would mind though – she wanted him alive for Phil. He was (pretended to be) Phil's  _friend._ "Also, I can track it. Anywhere on the planet, I can find that, so don't try to run."

 "Run? Are you crazy? HYDRA doesn't like leaks. I'm safer with you! Even if you do have questionable taste in friends," he added, warily eying the still-masked Winter Soldier.

 Dawn's smile was dark. "I'll take a brain-washed bullet to the chest over a knife in the back any day."

 “Brain-washed?” Sitwell repeated, eyes wide.

 “Didn’t you know?” she asked with a slightly manic grin. “HYDRA figured out how to recruit their enemies. Doesn’t work on everyone, but I figure the failures would’ve been killed anyway, so it all works out in the end.”

 “The Winter Soldier is _HYDRA?”_

 “Was,” she corrected sharply. “He’s not pleased with them. I can’t imagine why," she said with an acidic smirk. Then she stopped and turned toward James.

 "Incoming," he said flatly. "Lots of 'em."

 And those would be the STRIKE reinforcements with lights and sirens. Yep. Inconspicuous was swiftly going up in flames.

 "We'll swing around," she decided. "Get eyes on Cap and co. and clear them an exit."

 Easier said than done, but wasn't everything?

 "That's a fuck ton of guns," Sitwell noted.

 "Shut up," she ordered, having no trouble determining that,  _yes_ , it  _was_  a fuck ton of guns and goons holding them. "If you're not going to be helpful, be silent."

 She thought she and James could take them, but not with a guarantee of minimal civilian casualties. There was also the nagging suspicion that she was missing something. And not the news copter.

 Thank you, mainstream media, finally being useful for a change. Rumlow was a goon and a dick, but he wasn't stupid enough to shoot  _Captain America_  on prime time. That was an act guaranteed to get the American people in an uproar, which was quite the opposite reaction of what HYDRA was going for.

 She stopped James when he went to fire at the goons loading the captured trio into the back of one of the vans. "One of those goons is not like the others," she sing-songed with a grin, having developed a knack for recognizing people she knew in other guises.

 (Natasha and Bela had somehow joined forces in the Fine Art of Disguise. Because her grandfather had a sick sense of humor. Seriously. How was this even her life? Oh right. Because the devil knocked her mother up.)

 James frowned.

 "Whoever said HYDRA was the only one allowed double agents?" she asked rhetorically.

 James's answering grin looked rusty. Eh, they could work on it. She silenced Sitwell with a look.

 They commandeered the last STRIKE vehicle before it could follow the line. Either Sitwell was impressed by her threats or really believed HYDRA would kill him without hesitation for his failure because he actually helped.

 "Drive," she told James, reaching for the familiar feel of Nat’s blade again. "And don't run over the people in the middle of the road."

 He didn't question her as she maneuvered unconscious and dead bodies around the back of the Humvee. Sitwell, however, did.

 "What people in the middle of the road?"

 In answer, she popped the trunk, leaned over, and yanked a breathless Natasha into the car.

 "I was wondering when you'd be making an encore appearance."

 Dawn flashed a grin before repeating the process three more times.

 "Morrow," Hill said in wary recognition. “What’s your part in this?”

 “I’d blame it on the bagels, but I was already on a collision course when you called.”

 Hill frowned, glancing over at Nat and Steve, neither of whom looked surprised or concerned to see her. “I never called you.”

 “You called Lux, but Dawn Morrow and Kyria Lux are both me.”

 Sitwell jerked back as Hill gave a long considering look. "Why didn't I recognize you?"

 "Oh, you know. I have one of those faces," she said innocently.

 “Right,” Hill said sarcastically. “The Director?”

 “Helped me set it up.”

 Hill shook her head. Her eyes flickered to Sitwell and back. "Interesting company you keep."

 Dawn shrugged in return. "Sitwell's the closest thing we have to a witness."

 "And who's driving?"

 She couldn't help but grimace. "A long story. Suffice to say, he's a friend."

 Hill raised an eyebrow. "SHIELD has been infiltrated, Morrow. I'm going to need a little more than that."

 "I only want to go through it all once. So. Where is he?"

 Nat, Steve, Sitwell, and Steve's friend who she  _still_  hadn't gotten the name of looked at each other in confusion.

 Hill frowned. "Dump the bodies and I'll tell your driver where to go."

 No one had any objection to dumping the compromised STRIKE goons out of the moving vehicle. It was the driver that raised issues.

 Hill took one look at the metal hand wrapped around the steering wheel, closed the partition between front and back, and sat back in her seat as if the perpetual stick up her ass was more uncomfortable than usual.

 "Why is the Winter Soldier driving our get-away car?" she asked tightly.

 "Because I broke him out of a HYDRA base a few days ago."

 "You – ?" Hill broke off and shook her head. "And he came willingly?"

 "HYDRA wiped his mind. He didn't serve  _them_  willingly. We're working on putting him back together, but they've had a long time to scramble his head. It takes time."

 "And you trust HYDRA’s  _brain-washed_   _ghost assassin_  to drive us around?"

 "Who's the biggest ghost story next to the Winter Soldier?"

 Hill blinked at the apparent non sequitur. "Um, I don't know. The Morningstar, maybe? SHIELD had eyes on him at one point, but no one's heard anything about him in well over a decade."

 "Her," Dawn corrected.

 "What?"

 "Morningstar's a her. And the reason no one's heard anything is because she got a new name."

 For a double-dealing patsy, Sitwell got it first, staring at Dawn in open horror. Hill just frowned. "How do you know this?"

 "Because I was there when SHIELD gave her a name instead of a grave. She got another name change recently, but I suspect current events might cause a problem there."

 Hill was still frowning. "Why?"

 "Because while Kyria Lux is Orion, Dawn Morrow is Morningstar."

 Hill looked like she swallowed a particularly large and still squirming insect. "The Director knew about this?"

 "He’s been personally involved since Clint and Phil brought me in," she offered. "Look, I know you have a lot of questions, but I think we both know Fury's the only one who can answer them."

 "I don't know if you heard the news, being all over the place like you seem to be, but Fury's dead," Sitwell pointed out.

 Dawn's grin was predatory. "Yeah, and? So's been half my contact list at one time or another. Doesn't mean it ever sticks."

 Steve and Natasha looked hopeful, Steve's mechanically winged friend looked confused, and the look on Sitwell's face was incomprehensible. 

***

 Hill directed them to a hidden base under a disused hydroelectric dam.

 A very much alive, if slightly banged up, Nicholas Fury met them there.

 "About damn time."

 "We were busy," Dawn retorted. "And, really, a car accident? Why would anyone who knew you actually believe you could die in a car accident?"

 "It wasn't an accident. I got swarmed with fake Metro PD and the systems in my car went down."

 "SHIELD systems?" she asked pointedly.

 He grimaced.

 "So you torched the car with a body inside?"

 "Can't kill someone who’s already dead."

 "But they ran tests on the body," Natasha protested.

 Dawn shrugged. "Some paranoid bastard ordered a tub of garlic and herb cream cheese."

 "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you," Fury retorted amidst the confused stares.

 Hill took pity on the assembled group. "It's an emergency contingency code. SHIELD has a few of them, actually, but I don't think they've ever been used. Deli D'Oh's certainly hadn't been before this."

 Steve's friend blinked. "Deli D'Oh's?"

 "It's a bagel store," Dawn said. "Ordering a tub of garlic and herb cream cheese gets you a false positive on a DNA test. It wasn't the first time I hacked SHIELD."

 "We have codes for that?" Steve asked with wide eyes.

 "SHIELD has codes for everything," Hill replied.

 "What's the code for HYDRA calling the shots?" Dawn asked.

 Fury raised an eyebrow. "You want to introduce me to your friend here first? I'm not entirely comfortable with the fact that you brought the Winter Soldier in on this."

 "It could've been worse," she retorted breezily. "I'm pretty sure he was the one supposed to kill you."

 The group collectively froze at that.

 Dawn shrugged unrepentantly. "I found him with HYDRA in D.C. a few days ago. Didn't know they were HYDRA at the time, but the timing fits."

 "That's all well and good, and I thank you for that, really," Fury said, "but that still doesn't tell me why you felt the need to bring him in."

 She let out a long breath and looked straight at Steve. "I'm sorry."

 He looked confused. "For what?"

 She turned to her companion. "James?" she asked.

 He hesitated, staring at her from behind his mask before nodding once. He pulled the goggles over his head, then looked down and removed the mask. Hair covered his face for a moment before he straightened.

 Steve froze as stiff as he'd been for the better part of seventy years, his eyes wide as saucers.  _"Bucky?"_

 "Hey punk."

 Dawn bit her lip to keep from reacting to the flash of pre-Winter Soldier. Now was probably not the best time to admit she didn't actually know how much had emerged from beneath the extensive conditioning.

 Steve was caught somewhere between a sucker punch and an early Christmas. "How? You  _fell_  –”

 "I don't remember much," James said giving a little half-shrug with his right shoulder.

 Steve's friend looked between the two men. "Just to be clear, we're talking about Bucky Barnes, Howling Commando, best friend of Captain America, killed in action just before this idiot took a swan dive?"

 "Not killed, obviously, but yes," Dawn said. A grin tugged at the edge of her mouth. "Tony said we had the entire World War Two subplot."

 "You do," he agreed, then stopped. "Tony  _Stark?"_

 "Who else?"

 "Jesus."

 "Never met him," she deadpanned.

 His amused and overwhelmed snort was covered by Steve plowing through the entire exchange. "But you  _fell_. I watched you fall. I didn't think anything could survive that – if I'd thought for a  _minute_  that you coulda survived –”

 "Zola was trying to recreate the serum." Both – well, she guessed they were both super-soldiers – turned to her. "Tony dug around," she said with a shrug. "That's what happens when you show up at his door with a mystery. Captain America's grand debut – Zola was experimenting on some of the men when you showed up to rescue them. Whatever James got, it enabled him to survive freefall in the Alps. Mostly, anyway. We think that might've been how you lost your arm."

 Steve looked at James and James looked down at his metal hand. "Zola's dead this time?" he asked tightly.

 Both of Fury's eyebrows shot up, but Dawn ignored him. "He said it was his brain. I don't care how computerized the bastard was – he can't survive without a brain."

 "Okay," Fury said. "What the fuck did you get up to while I was dead?"

 ***

 Among the massive reveal all around, apparently, Jasper Sitwell took "legendary patsy" to new heights.

 "Wait, so he's  _not_  a bad guy?" asked Steve's friend, name Sam Wilson, codename Falcon.

 "I made it into Pierce's inner circle. I couldn't break cover – not even for the Director's death," the bald agent said with stiff pride.

 "Still not sorry I shoved you off the roof," Nat remarked.

 "Phil doesn't like Dawn Morrow, thinks she's a cold bitch. He's not wrong, exactly, but I don't know what he'll say about you," Dawn admitted.

 Fury, meanwhile, was experiencing the mindfuck that was Alexander Pierce as HYDRA-in-Chief.

 "This man declined the Nobel Peace Prize. He said peace wasn't an achievement, it was a responsibility," Fury said, still showing shock over that particular revelation. "See, it's stuff like this that gives me trust issues."

 The biggest issue for Nat, aside from the one they'd covered on the phone, was Fury not being dead, which was a relatively lesser matter compared to the mess of world-altering secrets currently being bandied about, so she was in the best mental state of being to cut through the conversational red tape. "We need to stop the launch."

 "I don't think the Council is accepting my calls anymore," Fury replied.

 "The Council rarely listened to you anyway," Dawn said sharply. "But since you knew that, I'm thinking you have a real plan?"

 Between Hill and Fury, they knew exactly how the damnable Helicarriers operated and had found a work-around that the two of them couldn't implement on their own.

 Basically, they had to manually replace a computer chip on each of the three carriers. But they had to do it before the Helicarriers reached three thousand feet and became fully weaponized. And they had to get to all three of the ships because even one of those things remaining operational was enough to kill a whole lot of people.

 Fuck Zola and his fucking threat-assessment algorithm. Fuck Project Insight. Fuck the Council for thinking it was a good fucking idea. Fuck Pierce and  _definitely_  fuck HYDRA.

 "You done?" Fury said.

 "No, actually," Dawn retorted acidly. "While I'm at it, why not fuck SHIELD, too."

 "SHIELD is not the problem here," Fury immediately protested.

 Her rather incredulous, "Is  _that_  what you thinking is happening here?" was lost beneath Steve's firm, "SHIELD's been compromised. You said so yourself. HYDRA grew right under your nose and nobody noticed."

 "Why do you think we're meeting in this cave?" Fury countered. "I noticed."

 "How many paid the price before you did?"

 "The rot goes deep," Dawn put in before the two alpha males could get into a pissing contest. "HYDRA's been inside SHIELD since the beginning. This can't be fixed by simply culling the herd – we need to wipe it and start over."

 James flinched, ever so minutely. Nat was the only one aside from herself to notice.

 "SHELD, HYDRA – it all goes," Steve declared, firm in his belief and bolstered by her agreement.

 Fury looked around the mixed group, looking for someone to take his side.

 James just stared flatly at the former Director.

 Sitwell – she was reserving judgment on him, Director's orders or no – shook his head. "Nobody's really going to listen to the patsy, but from what I saw, it won't be easy to distinguish one from the other."

 "They're right," was Hill's response.

 Nat conspicuously said nothing.

 Sam raised his hands. "Don't look at me. I do what he does, just slower."

 Fury conceded defeat.

 "Not that I'm not on board for this, but we're really attacking SHIELD in broad daylight with . . . nine people?" Sam asked after a quick headcount.

 "I've got that covered," Dawn assured him. "I didn't come this far without knowing when to plan ahead."

 Hill frowned. "We can't trust anyone who might be HYDRA."

 "The Wonder Women are not HYDRA," Dawn assured her.

 "Wonder Women?" Sam asked in an undertone. "Are there more superheroes that I should know about?"

 "They also get coded as the Harmonics," Nat replied, with what might have been a smile. "They're not particularly thrilled about the codenames, but no one expects them to put on a girdle and swing a lasso, so they tolerate it."

 Hill ignored the aside. "There is no way to know for sure –”

 Dawn cut her off. "HYDRA is SHIELD," she said flatly. "Therefore we cannot trust SHIELD. But these women are mine, not SHIELD's, even if SHIELD pays the bills."

 "What are you talking about?"

 "Haven't you ever heard about the legion of ninjas Kyria Lux keeps in her closet? It isn't as farfetched as the rumor mill makes it out to be."

 ***


	11. Chapter 11

It wasn't quite so simple as waking up tomorrow morning, walking up the SHIELD headquarters, swapping out the targeting blades on the Helicarriers, and dumping the entire SHIELD database onto the internet for everyone and their mother to pick through for anything HYDRA-related.

 They had to rig up a disguise for Natasha, for starters. It was times like this that made Dawn wish NINJAT had an active shapeshifter on staff. Unfortunately, being born and not turned meant shapeshifters were relatively rare and only showed up on the radar went they inevitably went insane from stealing people’s memories and starting killing. Her ninjas had yet to save an insane shifter. The only ninja-associated shifter she knew of was a poor girl kept locked in an attic by her mother. A psychic by the name of Missouri took over her care after Bobby told NINJAT about the girl and if Dawn even _thought_ about sending Olivia on missions, Missouri would be after her with a wooden spoon.

 So, no, NINJAT lacked disguises more complicated than aliases and Bela’s Facial Fidelius. SHIELD, on the other hand, had nifty little things called Photostatic Veils, which were fairly new and uncommon and would hopefully hold up under all the security sure to be in place for the launch. Of course, to use the Veil, they had to intercept the _real_ Councilwoman Hawley before she reached the Triskelion tomorrow to bear witness to the (hopefully aborted) launch of the Insight Carriers.

 Steve also needed a new uniform, having been forced to abandon his SHIELD-issue one due to the SHIELD-issue tracker embedded in the material. The argument could be made that, being Steve’s original uniform, it belonged to him and therefore he wasn’t actually _stealing_ it from the Smithsonian. It could alternatively be argued that the uniform had just been on loan from SHIELD, in which case the repossession was happening on the Director’s orders, even if it wasn’t following protocol.

 Not really. But arguably. Anyway, it was for national security.

 Nat just smirked and said that if Cap had his original enemy and his original teammate, why not his original uniform as well?

 Steve promised to return the uniform when this was over.

 "With or without bloodstains?" was Nat's impertinent comment.

 "Hopefully without," Steve said. Dawn wasn't sure if it was deadpan or if he was just that serious. She knew the original supersoldier did have a sense of humor, but the situation was fairly dire, so it was up in the air.

 More solid, or at least the part much of her attention was occupied with trying to  _make_  more the solid, was the part where (almost) every electronic file SHIELD possessed was abruptly declassified. The problem of course was that there was more to dumping the database on the internet than just dumping the database on the internet.

 "We can't just dump the whole thing on the internet. I know some paranoid bastard kept NINJAT out of the database – for good reason, clearly – but there are active undercover ops going on, and I'd prefer not to slap a target on the backs of unsuspecting agents, HYDRA or no. Not to mention all the weapon specs or the multitude of other classified information that would do a lot of damage if suddenly freely available," she pointed out.

 "Not that I object to the sentiment, but we don't have time to search the files if we want to cut HYDRA off at the knees," Hill argued.

 Dawn grinned. “That’s why I have two professional hackers, a billionaire genius with an artificial intelligence, and some fancy electronic talents of my own.”

 "Including a ninja drive?" Nat asked with a matching grin.

 "What's a ninja drive?" Sam said, looking around.

 Dawn pulled a sword out of thin air.

 "How'd you do that?!"

 "Tony, Bruce, and Jane got into a debate on the subject once. More than once, actually. They call it a pocket of non-space. Really, it's a dimensional pocket that only I can reach into. All angels have one, although it's mostly collective."

 "How can you have a collective pocket only you can reach into?" Sitwell asked.

 “Imagine an armory where the person in charge has access to all of it, but each agent can only withdraw their assigned weapon,” Dawn explained vaguely. There was too much to do already to get into a philosophical debate about the nature of Heaven.

 "It's how my sword operates, too, isn't it?" Nat asked. Everyone looked at her. The red-head shrugged. "Dawn – she was Kyria at the time – gave me one of those swords. Different shape." Nat frowned, concentrated, and a stiletto blade appeared in her hand. She turned it over and then released it back into nothingness. "It's still technically Dawn's sword. But it's also mine. There's some sort of supernatural politics involved. It's my weapon, but it's in her pocket because humans can't support their own bubbles of non-space. I can take this out, but not any of the others, because I'm linked to just _this_ one."

 There were a couple of ill-concealed stares.

 "I'm more than just a deadly body," Nat retorted smugly. "Although, I've always wondered what would happen to the pocket if you died."

 "It would still be there," Dawn replied. "All of my assignees would still be able to use their blades in the same manner, because I set it up to last. Joshua helped me ensure it would survive my death."

 James fixed her with an intense stare.

 "Angels don't like me," she said with feigned nonchalance. "I'm more active than I used to be, which increases the chance of one of them catching up to me. Hence my concern over the swords I gave out. But we digress."

 "Yeah," Sam said wide-eyed. "Real live angels really trying to kill you. My world view is so completely fucked right now. What were we talking about?"

 "Ninjas drives," Nat replied, helpfully offering the decidedly non-regulation bottle of liquor she'd swiped from the (allegedly) late Director.

 For a guy who trusted his life to strap-on mechanical wings, Sam eyed the bottle dubiously. "We're going into battle tomorrow."

 "And killer angels take some adjustment," Nat said. "Alcohol helps."

 "No, I'm not joking about this," Sam said under his breath as he accepted the bottle. Dawn flashed him a grin.

 "Ninja drives?" Jasper asked.

 "Basically a pocket of the internet that only I can access. Well, me and whoever I allow," Dawn explained. "It's what we have in place for NINJAT reports and communications. Think of an unhackable, password protected web library."

 "Instead of dumping the database straight onto the internet, we transfer the files so that only you have access?" Hill asked with a healthy dose of skepticism. "I thought the idea was to expose HYDRA to the world."

 "That's why Tony and the Twins would be putting the files on the internet as soon as they looked it over."

 "Considering just how many files SHIELD has in its database, that would take  _months,"_  Hill said.

 "Ah, but Tony has an AI. JARVIS is much faster than even Ash and Charlie at their best," Dawn pointed out. "Plus, Morningstar's going to be helping."

 "You're not helping take down the ‘carriers?" Steve asked, frowning.

 “Between you, Falcon, my Amazons, and whatever air support SHIELD can provide, you’re more than covered on that front. If you really believe you can't take down the carriers without my help, I will, but I can chew through complicated computer shit faster even than JARVIS when I put my mind to it. I'm put to better use trying to minimize how much we completely destabilize national and global security by revealing most of SHIELD’s dirty laundry in addition to HYDRA's continued existence."

 That was kind of an argument killer right there. Because as much as this was really the only way to throw HYDRA into the spotlight, they  _would_  be destabilizing the balance of power the world over when they revealed everything SHIELD had hidden away in ones and zeros. And while this was the best and only option available, they wanted to minimize collateral damage as much as possible.

 Between Captain America, his winged companion, and a veritable army of warriors, there shouldn't be too much difficulty traversing a base fighting itself in order to disable the three helicarriers. Morningstar (or Orion) seemed a bit overkill when added to a tribe of extraordinarily strong women trained to fight and kill.

 It wasn't that she didn't want to thrust herself back into the public eye more than absolutely necessary. Or not  _just_ that anyway. Her skillful handling of electricity gave her an oddly instinctual knack of manipulating computers. She  _could_ out-pace JARVIS. Tony had tested it once, right after New York, when he was still smarting from her hacking into his system in the first place. That it had been to save his life hadn't mattered so much the simple fact that she broken into his house and played with his toys.

 As he said, he didn’t share well.

 Tony had been all but gaped when she beat JARVIS and had been determined to find out what made her tick ever since. Hence the slight fixation with scanning her at every opportunity. He hadn't discovered a proper scientific explanation for her abilities yet, but there had been a few interesting theories about the Heaven, Hell, and pocket dimension, as well as the fundamentals of a program to track angels and/or demons when properly calibrated.

 Dawn's talents were best put helping Stark and the NINJAT hackers analyzing the files and trying to at least cursorily sort SHIELD from HYDRA before everything went public. There would be a staggered lag between the ninja drive and freely accessible internet disclosure, in order to obscure exactly what was happening with the files. For the most part, the four minds plus JARVIS would have discretion over what would be kept off the open servers.

 The internet was a big place. They could always release a file later and claim it got lost in cyberspace or something.

 As anathema as the action would normally be, she gave Stark all of her SHIELD access codes, pulling up every scrap of file she could grab without the security overrides to unlock the whole thing. Anything that could be looked at now, she wanted looked at now, because tomorrow would offer up the rest of the iceberg. Under no circumstances was their combined assault/exposé going to go down like the Titanic. Not while there was anything she could do to possibly make this mission a success.

 It  _needed_  to be a success.

 Fuck. How did she keep getting caught up in the fate if the world? It wasn't fun.

 With Team Hacker hard at work with the current materials, she called Phil. He didn't answer. Neither did May. Or anyone else on the Bus. Probably dealing with their own shit. Hopefully the team wouldn't get caught up in this SHIELDRA nightmare, but they were SHIELD, and Phil would sooner cut off his hand than let go of being an agent of SHIELD.

 Yeah, right he wouldn't get involved.

 Fuck.

 She'd try to contact him again in between everything else she needed to do tonight.

 Clint was out on personal time. He’d blistered her ears when he found out _where_ she’d put his brother, but considering there were at least three vampires and a couple of hunters in the area, Barney could be disappeared long before he ever put Laura or the kids in danger. Clint still wasn’t happy, but he was dealing with it. And as glad as Dawn was that Clint was facing his ghosts, did he have to choose _now_ to have a reunion with his brother? Calling Clint would lead to a complicated argument about why he couldn't help when there was no time to get him here. There wasn't really time to argue about it either, so she did the next best thing: she called Barney instead. 

***

 "I need you to sit on your brother."

 Barney Barton blinked stupidly at his phone. "Agent Morrow?"

 "Sort of. It's a long story and we're operating under every conceivable meaning if the word deadline."

 That didn't make anything clearer. "Uh . . ."

 "Not having learned how to fly yet, there isn't time to get Clint back here. So you're gonna have to keep him there. I don't care how."

 He was just going to pretend he knew what she was talking about. Having literally gone straight from the prison gates to comfortable living, going along with Agent Morrow seemed to work out well for him. That didn't mean he wasn't curious about the urgency in her voice.

 "Um . . . why?"

 "Because SHIELD's imploding in just over nine hours."

 He tried not to choke on his own tongue.  _"What?_  The same SHIELD that's paying for my life?"

 "Eh, I'm gonna transfer everything to Stark. But Greek mythology really sucks and no one learns shit from history. World War Two is about to blow up in our faces. Tell Clint to check the ninja boards. Whatever you do, do not let him leave. And if anyone from SHIELD shows up – shoot them."

  _"What?!"_  he exclaimed again, but the only thing on the line was dial tone. Fuck. He was beginning to suspect there was a  _lot_  more going on than he knew about. Prison might have been simpler. 

***

 Faced with the inevitability of her dual identities going at least semi-public, Dawn called up the Ninja Queen of Cover Bullshit.

 "What kind of bloody mess have you gotten me into this time?" Bela demanded.

 Dawn told her.

 Bela swore. Fluently. In a number of languages. Despite her extensive knowledge, Dawn found herself impressed. Especially by the number of rather creative curses the former con-artist claimed she would use as soon as she found a way to send electronic hex bags.

 Eventually the PA agreed to cleanse the Morrow and Lux files of anything that remotely led back to the supernatural and remove all traces of the ninjas.

 Dawn thanked her.

 Bela swore some more and hung up the phone. 

***

 Realizing this was the best chance she was ever going to get, Dawn drew up a few new reports to add to the impending info-dump. Tony roped in Bruce and Jane to contribute slightly faked technical details on the capabilities and origins of Orion and Morningstar. She wanted as much distance between those two figures as she could get considering they were both her.

 Morningstar was more top-secret than Orion and thus had a more redacted record. As much as she didn’t want to, she left enough traces in Morrow’s file that the agent could be conclusively identified as Morningstar. She’d been a little too active with this to fade into the background.

 Officially, Dawn Morrow, aka Morningstar, had been recruited into SHIELD at Barseback when Barton caught up with her. She was part alien – no one quite knew how much or what, just that her DNA wasn’t properly human – and older than she looked. But she didn’t want to _be_ different and had been more than happy to fade anonymously into the ranks of SHIELD agents. Morningstar had a bloody history, but, thankfully, she could (and did) truthfully explain that most of the bodies that brought her to SHIELD’s attention hadn’t been her at all.

 Not so for the Black Widow. Her friend was a product of the Red Room and there was no getting around that fact, but Dawn had no qualms about slanting the story to show Natasha in a more favorable light. Therefore, amid her file manipulation, she played up the fact that the assassin had just about tried suicide by SHIELD. Not exactly, but she had a vivid recollection of the red-head being so desperate to get away from her “handlers” that she was willing to do so in a bodybag if that was the only way. Phil had spent the entire time berating Clint and Kyria over comms.

 None of it would keep the media sharks from digging up every black spot on Natasha's record, but it would keep them from completely tearing her to pieces.

 Clint wasn't nearly so difficult to protect, what with Laura and the kids already missing from SHIELD’s radar.

 With her hackers busy sifting through SHIELDRA, she coordinated with Bela in systematically removing every person affiliated with NINJAT from so much as being named in SHIELD's files. All of the NINJAT safe houses and properties were similarly renamed, their titles altered to show ownership by Stark or the vast well of pseudonyms associated with the numerous ninjas. A whole bunch of nomadic hunters suddenly inherited real estate. She threw up some more messages on the ninja boards and emailed Pepper, apologizing for the possibly impending IRS nightmare.


	12. Chapter 12

For such a relatively minor detail, the question of what part James, Bucky Barnes, the Winter Soldier, would play in the assault and beyond was a surprisingly sticky stumbling block.

 It was a weird mix of not trusting him to sit out unsupervised, versus who could be trusted to supervise him, versus allowing him to make his own decisions, versus trusting him in battle conditions, versus who would be able to supervise him with any real authority in battle conditions, versus numerous other issues that really shouldn't matter when faced with a situation of such potentially dire magnitude but did anyway.

 Steve, understandably, was emotionally compromised on the entire subject and didn't trust himself to make the right call. Nat was handling the apparent reformation of the Winter Soldier astonishingly well, but that was probably due to the  _bigger problem, mutual enemy_  situation they were dealing with.

 More irritating was the way Sitwell the triple agent kept shooting wary glances at HYDRA’s former weapon and Hill wasn’t as good as Fury in concealing the fact she was a bit thrown by the obviously altered design on his shoulder. But it was Fury who asked, “That supposed to be a serious statement?” with a nod towards the slightly chipped insignia.

 Admittedly it didn’t look very intimidating, but, “I don’t know – did you have to take the pirate jokes so seriously?” she retorted snappishly. Hill raised her eyebrows while Sitwell openly gaped. Dawn ignored them; none of her personas were intimidated by Fury, even if she usually was better at avoiding open insubordination.

 “HYDRA’s hardly a joking matter,” the possum Director said flatly.

 “Never said it was," she replied, oozing politeness. If he hadn’t realized she was touchy where her formerly brainwashed companion was concerned, he hadn’t been paying attention. Dawn, on the other hand, remembered the wary but resolute defiance on James’ face when he said he wasn’t their weapon anymore with acid-etched clarity. She had an almost feral desire to see HYDRA _burn_ for what they did to James and some of it came out when she added, “It’s nail polish. The shield on his shoulder.” Because she was feeling vindictive and had to wait for tomorrow to watch HYDRA crash, her smile showed too many teeth. “A pair of college girls did it. They’ll be helping tomorrow.”

 She took far too much amusement in the way eyes bugged out of their respective skulls at that bit of news. It was petty and rather Morningstar-ish, but Dawn Morrow _was_ Morningstar, even if not her father’s Morningstar, and James had taken far too much shit in the past seventy years.

 When everyone regained the ability to speak, if not eloquently, then at least not in incoherent gibbers, it was collectively agreed that it would be best if Dawn retained supervision of the Winter Soldier –

 "James," she corrected firmly.

 – because she apparently was able to control him and certainly was the reason why he  _was_  James (and maybe Bucky) and not just the Winter Soldier anymore.

 If he even _was_ James all the time. Yeah, that was a real question.

 Because, every once in a while, he responded to directed inquiries in Russian. As taciturn as he was, James had a fairly lengthy discussion with Natasha about weaponry that lasted right up until Nat commented on his accent. He shut down immediately and refused to acknowledge anyone other than Dawn after that, to whom he quietly confessed he hadn’t realized he was speaking a different language.

 She’d had to confess that he’d done the same the other night and she just hadn’t mentioned it. She was good with languages; it was one of the more useful angelic traits. Of course, the downside was that she hadn’t _noticed_ he’d switched languages right up until he’d called her “zarya,” Russian for “dawn.”

 She’d been called considerably worse. By more problematic beings.

 James, doing a passable job of faking normal despite the lapses into Russian, wasn’t a threat. Not really. All these years of juggling ninjas maybe warped her sense of threatening. All the centuries of angels and demon as well. So she didn't mention the nightmares or memory-freezes and remained the only person to know just how much James occasionally clung to reality with his fingernails. (Nat probably figured, with her history. Sam, from his work at the VA, likely suspected as well. But only Dawn  _knew_.)

 Revealing James’ mental fragility would get him benched and that would only make him worse. He _needed_ to see HYDRA fall. Having a set goal would get James through the SHIELDRA showdown intact, and she’d work things out from there.

 For the SHIELDRA showdown, it was agreed that Dawn would be at the Triskelion for her Morningstar hacking, so that she could make her presence known if needed. But she would stay out of the way where she wouldn't be in the thick of things when the loyal SHIELD agents (hopefully) turned on the HYDRA in their midst. James would stand guard over her while she worked.

 He looked down as he clenched metal fingers into a tight fist. "I don't want to hurt you again."

 "Again?" Nat asked sharply.

 "What'd you forget to mention?" Fury said in resigned exasperation.

 Dawn tried to make her smile less of a guilty grimace. "There are backdoors in his conditioning. The right code can instantly reactivate the Winter Soldier."

 "Zola used one, I take it?" the not-so-dead one-eyed man said.

 "Yeah. I got shot again," Dawn said somewhat flippantly. And then, because it was admittedly somewhat relevant, she added, "He also briefly tried to attack Stark."

 "I don't blame him," was Natasha's immediate and not so surprising response. Stark possessed the rare and dangerous ability to piss off everyone he met.

 Fury gave her a piercing look. "I am less than impressed that you partnered yourself to someone with scrambled eggs for brains and a flexible notion of 'enemy.'"

 Dawn could tell him about the psychic scarring even she with her generally repressed and under-trained abilities could sense, or the absolute  _horror_  that crossed his face when she electrocuted him out of soldier-state and his realized he put a bullet in her, or the way he somehow befriended a full grown girl born less than two years ago with the genetic memory of a warrior tribe going back hundreds of years. She could even tell him that James put his fist through a mirror when he realized he wore the face of a reputedly dead man and his mind wasn't his own.

 What she said instead was, "Hey, it's a step up from partnering with a guy with demon blood and the ability to bend steels rods with his bare hands, or the guy with demon blood who's basically a walking version of the Imperius curse, or the guy you never met who was the  _son_  of the demon who was spreading his blood around trying to kick off the apocalypse. I, on the other hand, am multiple people, including the millennia old daughter of the most famous villain in history, the interplanetary ambassador of the planet, and the wrench in the works for the apocalypse. I may have lived under a rock for a long time, but this is nothing I can't handle."

 She liked to pretend she was human. She really, really did. She didn't like reminding herself or anyone else that she would outlive everyone around her, or was that she was hunted by  _angels_  and  _demons,_  or that she was very much a threat in her own right. It was only by the grace of Fury’s paranoia that she and her ninjas stayed off the Index.

 But HYDRA had really pissed her off. Possibly more than Loki when, under some mind control of his own, he attacked her chosen family and made everything very _personal._ HYDRA became personal the moment she chose to rescue a man too scrambled to realize he was a prisoner.

 Sure, intelligence agencies typically operated in the broad gray region of morality, but killing off "potential threats" thousands of people at a time was not remotely in the same realm as gray. It had chilling parallels to Heaven’s plan to free the devil and let half the world burn in order to bring about Paradise. (She didn’t know if it was worse to compare HYDRA to Heaven or Heaven to HYDRA. Either way, it wasn’t a flattering comparison.)

 At least she knew why War had been so interested in the Winter Soldier and his handlers. Not that that made her regret taking down the Horsemen, or that the inadvertent early warning made her any less pissed at HYDRA.

 Righteous fury was included in her heritage, and in this particular instance, she wasn't willing to completely repress it. HYDRA was  _not_  launching Project Insight and she would do whatever needed to be done to prevent it.

 If that included flashing her heritage around more than she was generally comfortable with, so fucking be it. 

 No one really knew what to say to that, although more than a few of them, James included, gave her wide-eyed stares.

 Dawn ignored them and went back to NINJAT-proofing her files.

 Seizing what was unfortunately the best opportunity she was ever going to get, she snapped a picture of James focused on something the camera couldn't see (Steve), nail polished shoulder openly visible.

 She then wrote up a report on tracing the latest mercenary attack on her (Dawn Morrow) and the discovery she made having tracked her assailants to a bank in D.C. Between her work on Agent Coulson's recovery and an interest in SHIELD's defrost of Steve Rogers, Morrow was perfectly capable of recognizing James "Bucky" Barnes.

 The report was slightly more accurate on how she got Barnes out and started to break down his programming. She made sure to emphasis that Barnes did not know who he was, where he was, or what he was doing, and was therefore unable consent to serving the mercenaries. Her analysis of his brainwashing was clinical but extensive. Under no circumstances was she going to leave an opening for someone to claim Barnes was an enemy combatant; he was a tortured POW and, professional or not, she let her anger at that injustice bleed into her report.

 Included in the report was a good deal of research and speculation on how Barnes could have survived, including Zola-tested-a-version-of-the-supersoldier-serum-on-him-before-Rogers-rescued-him as the leading theory, with some experimental cryo-freeze technology mixed in for good measure. (As glad as she was that James had survived his legendary fall, Dawn still wanted to go back in time to unleash her wrath on the Soviet scientists who turned him into a weapon for HYDRA.)

 Included nowhere in the report was any reason why Agent Morrow would feel it within her capabilities to deprogram the Winter Soldier without alerting anyone or getting back-up or allowing a team of specially trained experts to take over. Although, presumably, it was because she was secretly Morningstar.

 Doctoring the time-stamps, she "emailed" the report directly to Director Fury, who by that time would have been distracted by the problems with Insight and hence would have ignored it.

 When SHIELD went involuntarily public and the world picked through the rubble, it would come out that Bucky Barnes didn't die in the Alps. More people might have a reason to hunt Agent Morrow, but her concern only stretched so far right now.

 James didn't know if he was "okay" with that or not, but Natasha thought it was a good idea.

 "You won't be able to hide forever. Too many people know to keep it secret. It's better if it comes out as one revelation among many. It’s always better to pick your own terms. You’re lying low after this, right?"

 "Yeah," Dawn replied. "I'm gonna need some time to finish the disclosures and then sort through all the shit I'm funneling into my head. Possibly find a nice rock to hide under until the world settles down a little."

 "Don't hold your breath," Nat retorted.

 Dawn shrugged. "It's gonna be a while, I know."

 For all that Steve and James were throwing each other lost puppy and painfully confused looks, respectively, James was doing a decent job of avoiding the national icon. It probably helped the world was trying to come down around their ears. But it meant that Steve didn’t have an opportunity to try to talk James out of disappearing with Dawn when this was all over.

 Night-before planning of attacking their own and destabilizing global intelligence was  _not_  the time to get into an argument with Captain America.

 Not that there would ever be a good time to tell Captain America his best friend long thought dead, who had been brainwashed to be an enemy assassin, didn't want to hang out with him. Whether it was identity issues or misplaced guilt over what the Winter Soldier had done or both (probably both), Dawn wasn’t sure, but either way, James got a wide-eyed deer-in-headlights every time she mentioned Steve. She could take the hint and reverted to her original plan of reuniting the two friends after James got his head on a little straighter.

 She had a few vague ideas about putting James in touch with Loki, Clint, Selvig, or any of the formerly demon-possessed who stuck around to learn more after the fact, but that was all pushed to the back-burner as there was the slightly more pressing issue of HYDRA’s plans to take over the world tomorrow. Attempted world domination rated higher than proper counseling for the POW, even if the POW was a national hero himself.

 In order to facilitate staying off the radar post-burning-SHIELD, Dawn she made herself (yet another) cover identity. Stella Buchanan and her wounded veteran brother James. Since by this time tomorrow her SHIELD credentials wouldn’t be worth the paper target they were printed on, she put her request for documentation through her contacts at the FBI. The Amazons in the Bureau knew what was coming down the pipeline, but it was only fair to warn Henriksen as well. He had "cooperated" with SHIELD often enough that he might have a problem with the fallout. Hopefully not, but it was hard to tell with this sort of thing.

 Just because Dawn had never rearranged the balance of world power before, didn’t mean she couldn’t plan for all sorts of contingencies.

 There was a reason she, out of all the Nephilim, was the one to survive millennia of angels and demons.

 In and around the contingency planning, nearly everyone managed to snatch a few hours of sleep. Dawn was the exception, but she promised to stand watch while James slept and, as wired as she was, tapping into an electric current served her better than some shuteye.

 Regardless of what Steve and his slightly insane team of soldiers may or may not have done in a war seventy years ago, the fate of the world should not rest upon the sleep deprived.

 ***

 


	13. Chapter 13

Apparently the manhunt for Captain America, in addition to damaging SHIELD’s reputation, required an enormous amount of man-power because the agent that met her at the airport hardly looked out of high school.

 Councilwoman Hawley gave the strawberry-haired girl a distinctly unimpressed look.

 “We’re – everyone’s really busy,” the girl said, having the grace to look embarrassed. “I’m pretty sure I got assigned this because my father would have an apoplexy if I was anyone near an assault and, uh, the agent-in-charge is scared of my partner’s mother.”

 Perhaps out of high school, but definitely not old enough to be more than a probationary agent, if not someone’s intern. Hardly fitting for such a monumental occasion, even if the poster boy had chosen a rather poor time to go rogue.

 The girl's partner turned out to be a scarcely older girl, perky and blonde, behind the wheel of a blacked-out SHIELD vehicle.

 Hawley smoothed away her frown as the first girl opened the door for her. Yet another girl, this one red-headed, waited inside with a tablet. She waited until Hawley seated herself and the first girl circled around to take the front passenger seat before saying, "Good morning, Councilwoman Hawley. There are a few things we need to go over before we arrive."

 Three little girls instead of one properly qualified agent. Despite the strong argument for quantity over quality, all three showed indications of being able to become competent agents given a few years' experience. Presumably to gain said experience was part of the reason they were sent out into the field unsupervised on a high-priority milk-run.

 They still made her feel rather old.

 The redhead lurched across the backseat as the car took a turn too fast and something pinched her neck.

 “Sorry ‘bout that,” the driver called genially.

 A hazy lethargy crept through her veins before Hawley could panic.

 "The effects are fast-acting, but temporary," the redhead said, face blurring to reveal the Black Widow.

 Well. At least she was taken down by a professional and not an intern.

 "Dawn really does want to keep us away from the assault," the first girl said apologetically, turning in her seat.

 "And nuke positive or not, it's probably better if you're not helpless if and when SHIELDRA goons show up," the blonde driver added.

 "It won't matter if we can't stop the launch," Romanoff countered.

 "That's why half the tribe is converging on the Triskelion as we speak," the first girl said with a strangely feral smile.

 The blonde driver grinned into the rear-view mirror. "In case you're wondering, I'm Jo, and this is Emma. We will be your bodyguard-slash-jailors for the present. Fuck HYDRA!"

 ***


	14. Chapter 14

Considering how much money went into all sorts of high tech security for the Triskelion, it was far too easy for their infiltration group to sneak in. Then again, having falsified a DNA test from New York, controlling security cameras and biometric door locks was child’s play. If that child was a Morningstar, anyway. And it wasn’t like Dawn had to sneak everyone in the back door, either. Nat was waltzing straight through the front door, and the Amazons legitimately in SHIELD were doing the lion’s share of bringing in their sisters.

 Not that Dawn hadn’t done a little hacking to ease the extra Amazons in, but still. With an inside source, getting past SHIELD’s security was ridiculously easy.

 No wonder HYDRA had had such an easy time of it.

 Dawn would take great pleasure in helping to bring them crashing down. Just as with Azazel, she didn’t need to be the one to pull the trigger. As long as _someone_ did.

 Once safely inside the facility, the group broke apart to pursue separate objectives. Dawn sequestered herself and James in Sitwell’s office. It was empty, had system access, and was fitting. Sitwell, meanwhile, was acting as back-up for Hill. Jasper and Maria, maybe. Battle prep elevated them to a first name basis. There was something to be said for Thor's notions of comrades-in-arms. Then again, Hill was a sub-director and, insubordination or not, Morrow _was_ an agent of SHIELD, within the chain of command. Even if she generally reported straight to Fury.

 Fuck all this specific naming. It was getting confusing. She knew too many people with too many names these days. Herself included. Something to work on while James tried to figure himself out from the pieces HYDRA left him.

 Fuck HYDRA.

 Recurring theme that. Especially considering they were about to strip SHIELD to fuck HYDRA. Yeah, well, fuck the evil Nazi bastards. They should’ve have the grace to die with their leader and not come back to be such a fucking nuisance.

 Realizing just how much she wanted them to _burn_ , Dawn took a series of deep, calming breaths. She needed to _infiltrate_ the computer system, not _explode_ it.

 James was watching her when she opened her eyes. She gave him a half-shrug, took another breath, and tried to release her tension through her outstretched finger. They sparked. She grimaced.

 “Ready?”

 James gave her a firm stare before nodding.

 She nodded back, said, “Mark,” and slipped into the electric flow of the building.

 She’d never spent much time at the Triskelion. Agent of SHIELD twice-over or not, Avenger or not, most of her “official” SHIELD duties, when they dictated being on SHIELD property, operated out of her office at the Hub. An office Bela usually had to herself, but it was still technically Dawn’s. Or Kyria’s, although Dawn had mostly “inherited” it. It was complicated. Like the rest of her life.

 But for all that she was largely unfamiliar with the Triskelion, it was still SHIELD coding. And she knew SHIELD coding. Mostly a superficial, surface familiarity, but this was the same system the Helicarrier operated on and she was intimately familiar with the systems on the Helicarrier. She hadn’t been this deep in an electric system since that rather disorienting experience during the infamous battle on the Helicarrier when she’d saved Phil’s life.

 While not directly responsible for anyone’s lives this time, she could still feel their weight, like the whispering _da-dum_ of Phil’s heart, always there in the back of her head. She only had the cameras’ eyes, though, so Steve and Sam and Fury and the others were missing from her sight. She couldn’t protect what she couldn’t _see_ , and even if they could protect themselves, they were still _hers_ and she protected what was hers, as much as she could. She could pick out the Amazons, though, scattered seemingly casually around the facility – and there was Nat in her blue skirt-suit disguise – and with her –

 Her instinctive, protective snarl at seeing Pierce looking so smug with his champagne glass was thankfully covered by the crackle of the intercom.

 "Attention all SHIELD agents, this is Steve Rogers.”

 Across the building people were stopping in the middle of what they were doing and looking around. More importantly, they were _listening_ , at least for now. Steve’s fame was finally getting him attention he _wanted._

 “You've heard a lot about me over the last few days. Some of you were even ordered to hunt me down. But I think it's time you know the truth. SHIELD is not what we thought it was. It's been taken over by HYDRA."

 People’s reactions were almost comical. Amongst the confusion and disbelief were gasps and widening eyes, flinches and fearful looks, tightening shoulders and wary glances; no one quite sure what was going on.

 Except for the ones that did, of course. She activated a facial recognition program and started making lists.

 "Alexander Pierce is their leader.”

 The World Security Council, as one, turned to look at the serpent in their midst with disbelief and contempt. Pierce’s casual reaction sanded the edges off that disbelief, pushing it into confused reality.

 “The STRIKE and Insight crew are HYDRA as well.”

 She pulled up the files on them, trying to locate them on the security videos.

 “I don't know how many more, but I know they're in the building. They could be standing right next to you."

 The agents threw around fearful, wary glances and awkward shuffling, but no one reached for weapons yet.

 Befuddled fools.

 "They almost have what they want. Absolute control. They ambushed Nick Fury."

 Ambushed, not killed. For a motivating speech, Steve hadn't wanted to lie. Truth, justice, the American way, and all that jazz. Although, really, Steve was the ideal the American way aspired to.

 "And it won't end there. If you launch those helicarriers today, HYDRA will be able to kill anyone that stands in their way. Unless we stop them.”

 The ground control techs grew increasingly worried. The Insight crews approached their helicarriers like there was nothing wrong. The helicarrier guards moved to stop them and Dawn felt a distant sense of regret as they fell. None of the Amazons had Insight clearance and she hadn’t been able to get them there in time. Sitwell would have been stopped, if not shot, before he ever got close.

 “I know I'm asking a lot. But the price of freedom is high. It always has been. And it's a price I'm willing to pay. And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not."

 STRIKE agents entered the Council conference room and pulled their guns on the foolishly naïve and confused Councilmen. Did they even _listen_ to Steve? Or had their brains all frozen on “HYDRA”?

 The confusion in the control room was abated by Rumlow marching in to force the launch, proving to the shell-shocked agents that, yes, this was HYDRA trying to take over the world.

 She idly made a note in Agent Klein’s file that he was exceedingly brave when singled out by the enemy. Then Rumlow pulled a gun, prompting Agent Carter, and then everyone else in the room, to do the same. Dawn noted who held guns on whom and tagged agents on the appropriate lists. Even a short list of agents whose allegiances were definitively known would be helpful in sorting out the pieces that survived this.

 She _felt_ the first shot. It resonated through her in a visceral, unearthly sort of way. Of course it was HYDRA that fired the shot. And chaos spread in its wake.

  _. . . it was granted to take peace from the earth . . ._

 Steve and Sam left the blind spots to get to the helicarriers and more than two dozen women pulled on encircled star armbands. The red, white, and blue stood out against the black sleeves. It made the Amazons visible targets for the HYDRA agents, but it let the SHIELD loyalists know that  _these_ at least were on their side even if they had no idea who most of these women were or where they had come from.

 The carriers climbed into the air and Steve threw himself off a roof onto one while Sam just activated his Falcon wings. The Cap-band warriors helped the loyalists get their planes up to provide air support before coordinating the evacuation of the Triskelion. Pierce took all that rather poorly, but Nat removed her disguise and Fury made his appearance and suddenly Dawn had access to the entirety of the database.

 Active operations were pulled to the side to get alerts that the op was compromised. Undercover ops especially so. Her lists of who was fighting for or against HYDRA were added and shared with her assistants; the Tech Twins and their trainees were good but couldn't really keep up with the sheer amount of data, same with Tony. Jarvis on the other hand, was very nearly keeping pace with her. Because the AI operated at faster rate than humans, she could converse with it/him even as deep as she was. Jarvis filtered out all files pertaining to the known HYDRA affiliates and extrapolated links and connections, trying to root out others. The HYDRA list grew faster than the SHIELD list – it was near impossible to prove a negative after all, Carter and Klein aside – but most agents were still unknown quantities.

 There was so  _much_. She had access to nearly everything SHIELD ever did, everything they planned to do, or wanted to do. It was an all-knowing feeling much like she had experienced with the Tesseract and the Aether, but it was infinitely more  _personal_  because she had been with SHIELD for fifteen years and she knew the people and the procedures and now she knew it  _all_  right before it fell from its corrupt and distorted foundations.

 And she could  _see_  the lines of rainbow-spectrum code shift as the third redrafted Insight carrier snapped into place, and across the board as Hydra blared its signal  _out of the darkness into the light_  and agents and facilities responded around the world.

 She could see it  _all_  and the files blurred through her extended mind and then they ran out and she gripped the edge of the desk as unbalanced wings unbalanced  _her_  and knocked the room into disarray and she  _could still see it_. The deadly firing circle flying – and falling – over her head, the firefights and brawls and lockdowns and confusion – and the failsafes.

 Of course there were failsafes.

 Her smile was all teeth as her wings folded down her back and sparks rained down with every feathery twitch. This was HYDRA on _her_ territory – she was past caring about who thought what about her. The answering grin indicated James felt the same.

 ***

 The rigged security pins sparked for a moment before the phone in Pierce’s hand shorted out. Three anxious Councilmen (and Natasha) frantically tore the pins off as Fury aimed his gun at a confused Pierce.

 “Not the effect you were going for?” Dawn asked sharply, striding in, her wings loosely folded around her like a cloak, micro-bolts of lightning jumping from her to just about everything electronic in the room except for James, following two steps behind. “I’d say sorry, except, well, I’m not.”

 "Orion?" one Councilman – Yen – asked, looking up from the burnt hole on the breast of his jacket.

 "Try again," she said flatly, eyes never leaving the ringmaster.

 Failed assassination attempt or not, Pierce smiled widely. "Agent Morrow. Or do you prefer Morningstar?"

 Fifteen years of keeping Morningstar separate from SHIELD turned to dust that easily.

 "So Zola got through before he killed himself then," she replied. Despite the burning anger, she felt vaguely detached, all of the files still very much _there_ on the edges of her perception. It was heavy and isolating, but also likely the only reason she hadn’t killed Pierce yet.

 "That he did," Pierce said, still smiling. "I heard the craziest things about you and the Winter Soldier. Not so crazy after all," he added, eyes sliding past her to rest on the coldly furious figure off her left shoulder.

 "The  _Winter Soldier?"_  another Councilmen – Rockwell – exclaimed in dismay.

 "Of course," Pierce answered. "The two biggest ghosts in the industry, Morningstar and Winter Soldier. No one but the Morningstar would have been bold enough to snatch the Winter Soldier from our grasp, especially standing as we are on the edge of the tipping point between order and chaos."

 "He is a person, not a tool to be used or stolen."

 “Everything is a tool,” Pierce countered. “Do you know how many wars and atrocities I’ve prevented by using that asset? Should I ignore the best weapon in my arsenal just because you don’t like my methods?”

 There was no pause. Dawn simply stepped forward and mid-action the sword appeared in her hand to spear through his chest. She had a gun, but guns were something  _Morrow_  used, and at this moment, she had left Morrow behind the way she had Lux and Orion. In this moment she was  _Morningstar_  – and Morningstar used her father's sword.

 Pierce gasped.

 "He is a _person_ ,” she repeated, all but snarling. “Not a weapon.”

 She yanked her sword out, the bloody weapon vanishing from her hand half a breath before a gunshot rang out, landing neatly between Pierce's eyes.

 "I thought you didn't waste bullets," she said conversationally, turning to her companion, ignoring the body falling almost at her feet.

 "I don't," James agreed flatly. "He had that one coming."

 She conceded the point with a nod, neatly turning to face the rest of the room, her smile a hair less feral than before. "That carrier is about to come down on this building. Might I suggest we leave before that happens?"

 "You certainly know how to make an entrance," Fury said, already starting for his chopper. The somewhat shell-shocked remnants of the World Security Council followed, although Singh recovered enough to notice neither she nor James made to board the helicopter.

 “You’re not leaving with us?”

 “We’ll make our own exit,” Morningstar replied easily.


	15. Chapter 15

All members of the infiltration team walked away from the burning Triskelion. Some limped, bloody and bruised, but the nine-man-band plus Amazonian support survived. He thought that made him feel . . . glad? Relieved?

 One more thing he didn’t know about himself.

 He did know he was relieved when Dawn helped him avoid the blonde man (Steve) who insisted on calling him “Bucky.” Just because he had (some of) Bucky’s memories of Steve did not mean he _was_ Steve’s Bucky. Not entirely. Maybe never entirely again. There were too many other pieces inside him. Too many men with his face.

 (You are more than the sum of your parts.)

 None of them could hurt Dawn, though. Dawn, who had so many pieces of her own. Dawn, who none of his pieces had any prior mangled memories of. Dawn, who had neither feared nor pitied the fractured, pieced-together thing he was. Dawn, who could stop him if his cracks endangered anyone else.

 So he was relieved when she announced she needed to sort out the agency worth of information currently taking up headspace so don’t bother her unless it was a real emergency and then took him and the nearest vehicle (her unknown-model motorcycle lying carelessly broken on the side of the highway courtesy of HYDRA) and disappeared.

 They didn’t go far.

 She brought him back to the house with the broken bathroom mirror (the face it had showed him belonged to a dead man), turned on the computer she’d previously showed him how to use (to learn about the man with his face), and made them both peppermint tea.

 “I really _do_ have a headache,” she said with a grimace, holding the mug to her forehead. “The aftereffects of neither the Tesseract nor the Aether lasted this long. It figures the terrestrial brain-fuck would be the worst of the lot.”

 One-handed, she pulled up a map of the states with numerous locations pinned around the country. Several were highlighted in red, with notes they were known by SHIELD as being associated with Kyria and/or Dawn. Others were orange, marking their recordation in SHIELD files, however neutral or isolated. Yellow were civilians; green stripes indicated they were “capably trained” (including several variations of Stark), while orange striped indicated the civilian inhabitant was “not ninja educated,” whatever that meant. Blue, including some odd names like “Roadhouse” and “Batcave,” marked hunter locations; blue stripes indicated places hunters frequented but were unowned or unprotected. Green meant ninja. Grey marked a generally uninhabited site.

 He (the voices in his head) couldn’t decide if the map was a vulnerable weakness or a useful tool.

 She asked where he wanted to go.

 (. . . the edge of the tipping point between order and chaos.)

 (C’mon. Let’s try this again.)

 He didn’t know. She said they had time to figure it out. He drank his tea. It was good. Hot. When she saw his cup was empty, she handed him her untouched forehead warmer and went to make more.

 No sooner did she put the water to boil than her phone rang. With a half-hearted glare at the device, Dawn answered.

 He managed not to flinch when she told the whiney voice (female, British) about getting shot. (Not a weapon.)

 (Incorrect, I am afraid.)

 He put the mug down before he broke it, fingers curling tightly into his palms.

  _In the depth of winter when nothing but hope and virtue could survive._

 (Incorrect, I am afraid.)

 He was relieved when a sword appeared out of thin air in her hand, distracting him from the voices in his head. (Voices with his face.)

 (Not only his face.)

 (Everything is a tool.)

 (He may only have been lost.)

 She touched the sword to her phone and screwed up her face in concentration. The sword vanished.

 Dawn got dismayed at the whiney voice and told her not to get shot again (Shoot her). She ended the call with a sigh and turned to him.

 Things happened quickly after that.

 He heard a sound like fluttering bird wings.

 Dawn dove to the floor, barely avoiding a sword like the one she’d just held that stabbed the air right where she had just been standing, wielded by a man who had not been there a moment ago.

 There were three of them.

 He shot all three, clean kill shots, but none of them fell.

 (Really? A Ninja target with an all-human operation?)

 (All-human.)

 (Incorrect, I am afraid.)

 Dawn rolled to her feet and pulled a matching sword (the sword from before?) out of the air. She speared one of the intruders (Enemy. Target. Mission?) and the light flared and the man on her sword was dead.

 So his guns didn’t work, but her sword did. He tried knives, throwing knives Dawn had given him for the attack on SHIELD.

 Knives didn’t work.

 But her sword through the chest of a second did.

 The third put his sword through her shoulder.

 (Shoot her.)

 Dawn screamed.

 She and the third disappeared as he heard the sound like bird wings again.

 He stopped breathing as he stared at the empty air.

 (I can help you try to find what remains.)

(Incorrect, I am afraid.)

 The fluttering wings came again, but they didn’t return Dawn. Instead they brought another man, this one wearing a trench coat. The man looked at the bodies on the kitchen floor (Dawn on the floor in pain, hands covering the gunshot wound in her abdomen).

 “Where is she?” the man asked in a gravelly voice.

 He didn’t know. And even if he did know, he wouldn’t betray her.

 (Don’t let anyone take that away.)

 (Shoot her.)

 He shot him. The man in the trench coat was just as resistant to bullets as the first three.

 “Where is the Morningstar Abomination?”

 (You need to do better than that to kill the Morningstar.)

 He threw the whistling kettle, but the man just tilted his head and the red blotches healed almost as fast as they appeared.

 Knives still didn’t work.

 The man in the trench coat reached for him and didn’t react when he broke his arm and touched a finger to his head.

 “Where did she go?”

 All the voices suddenly clamored for attention, but only Dawn’s made it through the white noise.

  _I have a mission for you._

_. . .  a lot of names . . ._

_. . . rebuild yourself from the ashes when there's someone there to help._

_. . . I’m changing what hunters do . . ._

_Gabriel save me from turning into Bilbo._

_You’ll understand when you meet my uncle._

_The best codes are innocuous._

_. . . not your soldier anymore._

_You never had a choice._

_I am the reason the people I cared about most are dead._

_. . . I’ll introduce you to my uncle . . . Gabriel . . ._

_. . . not because I said you should._

_Joshua helped me ensure it would survive my death._

_Angels don't like me._

_. . . the demon who was spreading his blood around trying to kick off the apocalypse._

_. . . the interplanetary ambassador of the planet, and the wrench in the works for the apocalypse._

_. . . a person, not a tool to be used or stolen._

_. . . a person. Not a weapon._

 (Not a tool, not a weapon, not because you say I should!)

 He threw himself backwards as the man in the trench coat tilted his head and stared at him. Twisting around, he grabbed for the fallen sword of one of the two men (not-men) Dawn had killed to test if it worked as well as her similar one, but the fluttering bird noise came again and the man in the trench coat went with it.

 Breathing heavily despite efforts to regulate his breathing, he collected the second sword as well, and then some supplies. He put it all in the red car still in the garage.

 Dawn was gone and this place was compromised.

 It was good then that he had a map of what Dawn had called “ninja safe houses.”

 He would look for safety and Dawn and Bucky Barnes.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Anyone interested in becoming a sounding board for Crazy Plot Ideas? 
> 
> R&S gets really complicated post-CATWS and while my subconscious is kind of awesome at helping me untangle plot twists, it also usually takes a while. I could really use someone who is familiar with the universe(s) and is willing to either (1) tell me an idea is crazy or (2) help me figure out the logistics of making it work. Maybe both.
> 
> Please and thank you!


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